Rankings

[EddieH]

I wish we had a like button in the forum Graeme

[PG]

I suggest finding a better gauge of whether you've had a good run or not.

suggestions wrlcome ...

Analyse your split times for each leg. Look at your time compared with those running at about the same speed. You should be able to work out roughly how much time you lost. Total time lost is a good measure of how good your run was.
This will also help you address your weaknesses and give you ideas on what to do to improve. Good luck!

While I agree with Homer that a more detailed analysis will give a better gauge of a good run vs a bad one, one of the hardest things to get a handle on is how much time relative newcomers spend on every leg in map-reading, decision making etc. which the best orienteers are able to minimise. I do think ranking points are useful for about 90% of events, as long as you are aware of their limitations and for the 10% don't get too excited when you get more points than expected or too depressed when you get less.

[roadrunner]

One approach that I used to use was to plot time against leg length - a bit tedious as you have to measure the straight-line length of each leg from the map, but on reasonably uniform terrain you can see how much time you lost on particular legs, how long you spend map-reading, and how fast you run. (I stopped doing it when I got into urban events, because it doesn't work so well for those.) There's an explanation at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nigel.houl ... ticle.html

WinsplitsPro (the software package, not the website) also gives some options that estimate time lost on each leg etc.

[JK]

I wish we had a like button in the forum Graeme

[Like]

[graeme]

But seriously.
Winsplits is the best resource to tell you how well you did. It highlights errors with a red shading, and gives you a position on each leg.Look at this example...

You can see the winner has no red - clean run. Only one other person had a clean run.
The first loser made one big error (45sec) at #2. The third placer has only one red box, but by changing the " conditions for a mistake " you can see a couple more appear. The " times without mistakes" box shows what time you could have done!

Winsplits also tells you that legs 4 and 9 were the tricky ones where many people lost time - I find this feature particularly useful to assess the courses I planned: in this case 3-4 is a classic "dead-end trap" while 8-9 had some unmapped scaffolding.

[Glucosamine]

Winsplits highlighting is useful, especially when scanning the whole field, but for me there is nothing to beat a good graph to take a lot of information in quickly, so Splitsbrowser does the business in my book.

The shame is that since the issue with that Indonesian island where the good coffee comes from, fewer events seem to have been linking to SB, even though a compatible version is now available. More graphs please!

[frostbite]

The shame is that since the issue with that Indonesian island where the good coffee comes from, fewer events seem to have been linking to SB, even though a compatible version is now available. More graphs please!

A version of Splitsbrowser is available in Routegadget 2, although it doesn't seem to be available for every race. Look for a control flag with a zig-zag across it in the buttons at the top of the page.

All the Lakes 5 events can be viewed although it seems to be a bit broken for the last day (where legs have been removed).

[charles2]

I agree, graphs are great.
Splisbrowser can instantly show you which legs you were good on and which ones bad compared to others. Also like the 'race graph' view where you can find which runners you overtook or who overtook you on the day.
All the Lakes5 events had SB and it is still useable for Hampsfell despite the voided legs.