Cancellation - Was it my fault?

[lorenzo601]

I've done a couple of mountain marathons where the stream crossings were a bit hairy, even buddied up.
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[Mrs H]

Yes. that's exactly what I think about CRB checks - the vast majority of people assume this means a person is safe to looks after their children and so don't bother to assess whether they actually would be safe let alone good at it. All it means is they haven't been caught yet - or they've changed their name! Risk Compensation! I didn't know it had a name

[greywolf]

The fact is O is inherently risky and orienteers know this and accommodate it.

Yes, up to a point, but the primary mechanisms for "accommodating" the risks include an accurate map and the knowledge that the planner & controller will have identified (and where necessary mitigated) the major hazards

In the specific case where a normally minor watercourse is in spate: whereas the planner/controller will have seen the stream in both normal and flooded state, and will know how deep it is & therefore whether it's crossable (although not how much better / worse it will be in an hour's time), the competitor won't. Nor will they know whether it's crossable 100m (or 1000m) upstream / downstream

This might not matter if you're out for a training run, or a sunday walk, but if you're in a race, then your options are to take an unquantified risk or waste an unquantifiable amount of time finding an alternative crossing point (and for some, to blow your chances of selection) - that's not a recipe for sensible decision making under pressure.

Yes Mrs H, AFAICS CRB checks are mostly there to protect organisations from legal action rather than to protect children (e.g the local schools where no-one's allowed in the building unaccompanied without CRB disclosures, but the kids are turned out into the streets for an hour at lunchtime ), but I can't believe you think that school teachers don't have a duty of care...

[Mrs H]

ha ha ha - you're being provocative I can only speak from a parent's point of view

[ChristineV]

We didn't go to the original November Classic because it was snowing in the morning - it doesn't snow that often in Somerset - and the A37 southbound was closed (it's quite high in places).

So we thought we'd go to the SOC event at Kings Garn Gutter this morning (on the same area). When we woke up, it was snowing ... and the A37 is shut again.

Spooky ...

(We did go to the MLS event which used some of the original maps - it didn't snow.)

[DavidJ]

We drove through snow and heavy rain to get there today and enjoyed a lovely run through lovely terrain - nearly all runnable woodland. Thanks SOC, third time lucky after the rain in November and the snow in January caused the last two events to be cancelled.