Butterflies

[graeme]

Now I've nothing against butterflies. As far as I know, they were invented for the Chasing Sprint and I'm all for innovation. But I wonder if people understand what the point is.

Way back when Rob Hart unveiled his cunning plan at the Chasing Sprint, his idea was to split up packs, and it worked tolerably well. But at from the JK it did quite the opposite.

The butterfly came too early: almost everyone was running solo going into it. And the effect of a section of control picking in open terrain was to form packs. if you look at the Splitsbrowser "race graph" it's rather revealing.

http://www.splitsbrowser.org.uk/splitsg ... entId=4596

I'm not trying to get at the JK, elites in particular are mellow about running together. But this seems to happen a lot nowadays with planners knowing what to do, but not why.

[NFKleanne]

guess you are not talking insects then! whats a butterfly?

[binman]

A 1980's sitcom starring the delectable Wendy Craig and lugubrious Geoffrey Palmer?

[Marco Polo]

guess you are not talking insects then! whats a butterfly?

The name comes from the shape of the course- see here for an explanation and a diagram.

http://www.baoc.org/wiki/Training/Descr ... erfly_Loop

The butterfly loops on Slieve Croob had a 2 control 'spine' so 5/9 and 8/12 were the controls visited more than once.

[awk]

They can be used to split a field up, but they can also be used to make better use of an area than would otherwise be possible. Recently, I've seen this done at a number of events, including SYO's Middle Distance event at Hugset.

[NFKleanne]

Thankyou - I've seen them before, just didn't know what they were called!

[Duncan]

It is true, most butterflies in the UK tend to end up being a control pick, but where that the planner has 2 or 3 less controls to put out. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. But I've rarely gone into a butterfly loop running with someone else (who I've caught or been caught by), and left them without that person (either behind or in front).

Take a look at this for an alternative approach to butterflies: http://www.tyrving.idrett.no/V1/o/lop/2 ... d=2&kieli=. Select the "M21" course. This was from O-Fest 2008 in Norway, and run as a chasing start the day after a World Cup race, with lots of big names there. The butterflies had one common control, and 4 loops, and they formed a substantial percentage of the course length (half?). I believe Thierry managed to accidentally miss out a whole loop in the butterflies, presumably because they looked so complicated on the map!

[Ravinous]

In a long race, a butterly cluster or even 2 is better than none - in my opinion - but agree with Graeme, it was too early in the race. Should have been after 2/3rds, not 1/3rd. I first saw my 3 minute man as I was leaving the cluster - also bear in mind it is 'seeded' to some extent as it was reverse order from the day before, so people should not have been catching up people until a bit later in the course.
I have done races with complex gaffling formats and it can work very well. Mass start races can have their fields split effectively. It is just quite a bit of effort but the athletes run much more of the race on their own.
2008 Israel Ultra Long Champs WRE map with some great loops/gaffling in late 2008 CompassSport issue is another example to Duncans.

[skybluepete]

This article about Lepidoptrism and the Orienteer was published in HALO News (April 2009) pages 14 and 15, warning of the potential epidemic.
http://www.halo-orienteering.org.uk/doc?id=46

Will we see any similar butterflies at Tankersley in 2 weeks - Mixed Ad Hoc variety?