Oxford City Race

[Mrs H]

Yes I shouted at some bloke from BOK who ran onto the grass as I carefully ran round from the statue - he looked genuinely scared and retraced his steps - it's such fun being at battleaxe

Too fast for me to claw anything back with any display of cunning but most enjoyable all the same - great weather, great company and I got to sit at the front of the bus upstairs

[madmike]

you are obviously more scary than me Mrs H - I shouted at someone and he just ignored me!

[Tatty]

I shouted at a young lady doing the same, and then realised she was Turkish and probably didn't understand me. She continued across the grasss to the path anyway!

[Producer]

Describing the race as not providing much in the way of navigations is a great understatement - on course 1 there wasn't any navigation - it was a road race with hardly any route choice at all and very simple controls - what on earth was the planner thinking - obviously not! The course needed 30 controls not 18. There was one control (No 11) that needed a location description (e.g. north side) that didn't have one and this is where GG and others made their mistake - why did every other control have a full description and this one not! And then there was the butterfly loop - traditioanlly a bit on control picking with tricky navigation but not in Oxford - just another sprint along roads full of pedestrians that would make a White course look hard! I can't believe how bad the course was and I'm not alone - everyone else I spoke to who ran course 1 thought so too. Course 2 was a slight improvement but again had lots of dead running with little route choice. Actually, come to think of it, the Controller should take their share of the blame to for allowing such poor courses.

[Blanka]

I agree that the courses were less challenging navigationally than previous Oxford City races. However, to be fair to the planner/organiser/controller/OUOC, the club did have an awful lot of trouble with getting permissions for using many of the colleges, and therefore it was presumably necessary to use the streets more than in previous years, so that was what the planner had to work with.

You can't just assume all colleges will let you in and this time OUOC were unlucky on the permissions front - hopefully next time, they'll be able to take us into more of the colleges again.

The "which side of the fence" description of the control on the fence on Broad Street was annoying but obviously not enough for anyone to put in a protest (everyone can make a mistake, and both planner/controller miassed it this time). I reasoned, when I saw the missing decription, that the control would be on the outside of the fence as it was in the direction away from when we were coming from, but that was just a good educated guess.

[Fratello de Pingu]

Essentially we had a fairly new team organising this year, and everything ended up happening too late.
If you look at the map you will see that there isn't any proper intricate navigation on the streets. In order to get that you need college permissions, which was the problem.

[greywolf]

it's true that unfortunately not every urban area is like Sisteron

mapped at 1:4,000 with 5m contours...

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or even Guildford Uni - but even in the most banal streetscape it should be possible to plan legs that have evenly balanced route choices, and put in enough controls to keep the decision-making pressure up

[Dave]

even in the most banal streetscape it should be possible to plan legs that have evenly balanced route choices, and put in enough controls to keep the decision-making pressure up

agreed. it was a shame oxford couldn't get permissions for the parts they wanted, but it just seemed they took out the controls from the colleges and didn't add any new ones. oh well, good training for the road races coming up i the next couple of months

[FRBlackSheep]

Definately a course where the brain could be disengaged... Unless we count tourist dodging as a valid Street O discipline?

[Spookster]

The "which side of the fence" description of the control on the fence on Broad Street was annoying but obviously not enough for anyone to put in a protest (everyone can make a mistake, and both planner/controller miassed it this time). I reasoned, when I saw the missing decription, that the control would be on the outside of the fence as it was in the direction away from when we were coming from, but that was just a good educated guess.

If you are referring to the control that was on the descriptions as a "wall/fence junction", then there is no need to say which side of the fence it was on. The wall does not exist on the south side of the fence, so it had to be on the north side. Similarly it wasn't necessary to say whether it was on the east or west side of the wall, because it wasn't possible to get to the east side.

I think a protest would have been thrown out, because the planner didn't make a mistake.

[Scott]

Given that the IOF define a junction as "the point at which two linear features meet", I think - as a general principle - that a side-of-feature description is helpful when the control is actually located on one side of that point, and not accessible from another side of that point. Otherwise it would be reasonable to assume that the control is accessible from all sides, as with a path junction - although it's not hard to imagine a control at an uncrossable fence junction which can be punched from all sides, and it would be just about possible to hang such a control at the site in question (although a little unfair on the vertically challenged).

[Gnitworp]

From the evidence of the map it is impossible to tell with absolute certainty which is fence and which is wall except for the fence to the west of the junction therefore an additional location qualifier was necessary. Yes, you could make an intelligent assumption, but control descriptions should be unequivocal as to marker location.

[Spookster]

Yes, fair point. If the wall had been the segment to the south east of the control, then the control would have been to the south of the wall/fence junction.

[graeme]

Looking at the map, its not a better description that's needed, its a better control site. 5m north on "wall W side" or a wall corner or even 2m west on "fence N side" would surely give exactly the same navigational challenge without the ambiguity. With hands-free punching as we had in the first Oxford race, the control would register regardless of which side you were: route choice really shouldn't depend on punching system

It's bad planning/controlling to have a control on one side of an uncrossable line feature which can be approached from either side and is a long way round: you should be able to navigate to the circle using the map alone.

I think a protest would have been thrown out, because the planner didn't make a mistake.

This is an awful line of reasoning. Its quite possible for a control to be unfair without "the planner making a mistake", and its quite possible for a planner to make a mistake without the course needing to be thrown out. The deciding feature should be whether competitors lost significant time unfairly, no need to blame the organisers.

[Angry Haggis]

It's bad planning/controlling to have a control on one side of an uncrossable line feature which can be approached from either side and is a long way round: you should be able to navigate to the circle using the map alone.

Really? I thought that was half the fun/challenge of ISSOM urban races - e.g. navigating to a bridge base and then discovering the control is directly above you, i.e. on the bridge itself. aka a "trap".

If it's really in the rules that you must not be disadvantaged if not consulting control descriptions until in the control circle, then we might need much bigger control circles for urban races.