Graythwaite Start List

[Homer]

and it will be interesting to see how many different possible routes there are on the long leg 10 back over the main hill, when RouteGadget is up.

.......and I will be interested to see if anyone else ran past the finish along the road as you did!
Too much street orienteering I suspect!

Great event, but how could they go wrong, given the area and the weather?!
I agree with Spookster re the paper the maps were printed on, yuk.

Thanks LOC.

Just one thought; the prizegiving was a bit sad. Too few prize winners present and too many missing trophies. I'm sure it would be an improvement if we made the regional championships 'Open' again.

[RJ]

........ is that I appreciated the 1:7500 because of the relatively poor printing resolutions and colours, but if the map had been 'properly' printed.......

Your comment awk is typical of the debate about the laser printing of maps. As far as I can see the opinions being offered are only based on personal perceptions.

It would help if you could say what the resolution of the printing is.... do you know? What do you mean by 'relatively poor printing resolutions'? So, it might surprise you to find out that it could be 600dpi. There are other things that affect the 'perception'.... the colours and the media used. The plastic film used didn't, IMO, enhance the printing. I didn't like it.

No two maps of different areas manage to get the same colour set and reproduction. There always has been a difference between any two mapped areas in the 'look' of the maps, even when they are 'properly' printed. Very, very few maps manage to be printed to the correct pantone colours.

So, what is it that we base our opinions on? What is the reference point? As far as I can see it is just...... IMO!!!

[Spookster]

and it will be interesting to see how many different possible routes there are on the long leg 10 back over the main hill, when RouteGadget is up.

.......and I will be interested to see if anyone else ran past the finish along the road as you did! Too much street orienteering I suspect!

I ran past the start and the finish on that leg. Not because I like street orienteering, but because I really dislike the sort of thick green forest that covers the top of that hill. My face is still bleeding this morning...

[seabird]

It will be interesting to see from the survey how may poeple would enxt time chose a different scale from the one they ran on. I heard mutterings while on course about both 1:10000 and 1:7500 being responsible for poor runs.

Incidentally how may people were disqualified or retired? They are not shown in the results.

I certainly gave up - but only because my navigation was utter c**p, and because some non-O friends were waiting for me to join them on a fell walk, which proved far the more enjoyable of the day's activities.

The course seemed fair but I got a bit fed up with having sticks in my face for what seemed a large part of the race.

Whether tthe undoubtedly clearer litho printing would have made my navigation any better I am far from sure. May be better to avoid a 30th birthday bash and a 60th ceilidh the day before!

[lindseyk]

Firstly I had a really enjoyable run, with a mixture of legs which allowed for good running at times, careful navigation at other times. This surely is the essence of a good course - no bias towards "navigators" or "runners" as is sometimes the case. Thank you Carol !

However, how many runners came a cropper from what appears to be a magnetic problem ? I know at least 4 of us on course 10 got veered into the dark green on leg 2-3 then discovered that our compasses weren't giving consistent results, making it difficult to know if we'd been veering from as soon as we left control 2, and where the heck are we now ! Luckily it was sunny so we used the old fashioned method of navigating, once we'd sussed out that our compasses weren't working.

[distracted]

I had a 1:15000 map yesterday, one of the reasons I went for this was because it was offered as an offset print, which affords the clarity to make a 1:15 map good to run on. I was therefore rather annoyed to pick up a laser printed map of noticeably lower quality... So can anyone from Lakeland tell me why they decided not to print the 1:15 maps using the offset process??

On the issue of map scales - I hope that the powers that be ignore the results of a survey which has been completely biased by allowing people to choose what scale maps they wanted to run on. There are only a couple of firm conclusions that can be made, which anyone could have come up with beforehand - people will choose a scale which they think suits them best and is therefore to their advantage, and that eyesight deteriorates with age... Given the latter point, I do not feel that a decision on scales for elites/21s can be justified by event officials who are over a certain age, as this deterioration means they cannot accurately and fairly judge the readability of the map at specific scales.

What would have been an interesting experiment - randomly allocate both scale (1:15/1:10 or 1:10/1:7.5 as appropriate) and print technology (laser vs offset) - as this can make a lot of difference - and then see what people's thoughts were after their run.

Your comment awk is typical of the debate about the laser printing of maps.

It would help if you could say what the resolution of the printing is.... it might surprise you to find out that it could be 600dpi.

RJ - I agree that the paper and specific printer can make a difference, but it doesn't really matter if the resolution was 600dpi, the print quality of lasers is still going to be poor relative to offset, for a number of reasons:

- you can't get the line thicknesses of the thinner lines correct - a line in a marsh at 1:15 should be 0.1mm thickness - that's 2.4 dots line width at 600dpi. So does the laser print a line of 2 dots thickness, 3 dots or a combination of the two? Do the latter and you get a fuzzy line. With the naked eye the blue marsh lines on my map don't look straight...

- the method of colour production. Quoting from this page:

Many high resolution printers produce low resolution (e.g. 100-300 dpi) cyan, magenta, yellow and black rasters (that are arranged with the correct angles to avoid moiré effects). These rasters are then combined to produce the correct colours. The size of the dots in the CMYK rasters are varied to produce colour. This results in very bad rendering of thin lines because it produces edge effects and also non-even colours.

- Look at what happens when two colours meet. This is most obvious on the contours through the green, which often have a yellow-looking edge to them. Laser printing doesn't blend and overlay colours like the offset process, so you don't get the darkening of contours in green areas or the overprinting effect of the purple course markings.

If you want to see the difference when magnified, including spot-colour vs 4-colour offset, take a look here - although these are a few years old, they illustrate the vast differences that exist in the technologies.

[lakesorunner]

It will be interesting to see from the survey how many poeple would enxt time chose a different scale from the one they ran on. I heard mutterings while on course about both 1:10000 and 1:7500 being responsible for poor runs.

This is an interesting one - if people were muttering about both scales, then could one assume that scale has very little to do with navigation (other than being able to see the map easier) and more to do with the fact that when things go wrong, everyone needs something to blame!

Anybody able to tell me who the on-line survey on the LOC website about Greythwaite is actually going to. The space for comments is tiny, and there's not enough room to say what's needed

We will try and address the latter point (about too small a space) this evening. The results of the survey are coming back direct to LOC, and will be added to the paper ones already collected. It's going to be difficult to gain that much meaningful data from the results, but it will hopefully give at least an insight as to what was offered, what was chosen, and what is needed to make (any) event better in the future, both for LOC and other clubs... Once we have something to say, we'll let you know...

Incidentally how may people were disqualified or retired? They are not shown in the results.

The DNF's etc will hopefully come back into play this evening when the results become more official, rather than the provisional ones at present. Wit a bit of luck, Rouegadget will go live then too...

[Spookster]

I had a 1:15000 map yesterday, one of the reasons I went for this was because it was offered as an offset print, which affords the clarity to make a 1:15 map good to run on. I was therefore rather annoyed to pick up a laser printed map of noticeably lower quality... So can anyone from Lakeland tell me why they decided not to print the 1:15 maps using the offset process??

Yes, I had exactly the same thoughts in the start lane, when I realised that the print quality of the 1:10 and 1:15 appeared to be identical.

I wonder how much it costs to print 28 maps at 1:15 using offset litho?

[alcumbria]

I agree with the comments about the paper it was too glossy. The next time that the paper is used can you cancel the glorious sunshine as it was quite hard to adjust your eyes when going from forest into the open with the reflective paper.
I took a relatively straight line on leg 9 to 10 including a fight through the green.
In hindsight the track through the SW part of the green would have probably been a better option

[awk]

My use of the word 'resolution' was probably not a good one, as I wasn't specifically talking about the dpi. My technical knowledge in that respect is far too limited! It was more to do with comparing a previous offset litho printed map of Graythwaite with the one used this weekend. With the fuzzier edged, dotty lines, the contours and fine detail off the latter were far harder to 'resolve' (especially in a dim light) - thus my use of the word resolution - than those on the offseet printed map. This was immediately obvious at the start line, in that dimmer light!

Personally, I was very happy with my choice of map scale for this particular event: in the circumstances it was definitely the best for me. However, I can't draw any conclusions as to preference of scale, as the maps weren't at national/international standards of printing. (I'm another one who didn't like the paper one bit either!)

This was my first run in terrain for six months. I thoroughly enjoyed the course, which had some excellent legs, although it became even more of a challenge (and a bit frustrating!) after I lost a contact lens - my eyesight is so appalling that this meant navigating and running using one eye with a reading lens in it to see by: very interesting! It struck me as somewhat overlong for a short course, but that seems to happen to planners in Greythwaite and I enjoyed it as a change. Will go down as one of the better events of the year, and thank you to Lakeland for a great day's orienteering!

[IanD]

I would like to thank the Graythwaite people for giving me a map which I could read clearly at glance, and which accurately reflected the runnability of the forest. My mistakes were all mine, with nobody to blame but myself.

I welcome the fact that most people were able to run using a map scale of their choice (although I know an M55 who would have preferred 1:15,000), and disagree with those who consider it unfair to offer a choice. So long as the choice includes the "standard" scale for a course, I don't see how anyone is disadvantaged, provided the print quality for two versions is identical.

By contrast, the JK day 2 & 3 maps were relatively inaccurate, especially with regards to runnability. I crawled on my hands and knees through some "white", later I was able to run at full speed through some "walk". The fastest running seemed to be in those areas given an undergrowth screen for bracken, although you couldn't distinguish the "bracken" undergrowth areas from the "brashing" ones, which were foul, without going there. In short, route choice was a lottery, and the competition therefore unfair, although I expect the best people won anyway.

In my opinion, BOF Map Group downgraded the wrong event.

[TimField]

Results have now been submited to the British Orienteering Ranking List and the results page contains calculated badge times.

My apoligies about the small text box on the map survey, but I only received a request to post a survey on line this weekend , and I was only able to action it when I got back to Newcastle last night. Can not find an option on the survey site I chose to make boxes bigger.

If you want to make longer commets please e-mail these to Ian Ward Smith - contact details on contacts page of LOC web site.

[lakesorunner]

Routegadget is now up and running for Graythwaite...

Let's see some of those monster long legs through/round the green!!

[awk]

Looks like route gadget only includes the first set of preliminary results, without the reinstatements etc. Tim sorted out. Any chance of having the uptodate results included instead?

[Gnitworp]

The Course 9 shown isn't the one we ran.