Guildford City Race

[maprun]

Thank you Arnold for the technical explanations for the London City Race, it's my first run this year, now I'll only be half dreading tackling the Barbican.

I agree with AndyP, forest almost everytime, though Guildford runs it a close second - with a wide range of urban technical challenges in a scenic town.

From what I heard, the planner stepped at a late stage after an earlier planner dropped out and produced some enjoyable challenging courses.

[Roger]

2 years ago my son wanted to use different colours to indicate whether upper or lower level was the relevant one at part of an event he was planning, but this was refused by the mapper and controller. Without that, there was in fact a canopy in grey (just like at Guildford) where both levels were equally accessible and equally viable. With a control in that area he had to resort to "on top of" / "beneath" as control description qualifiers.

If it's the area I'm thinking of, then a couple of years earlier the then mapper-cum-planner wanted to site a control on 'paved area, inside N corner'.

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Although you'd naturally go to the right place if you approached from the south, anyone coming in from the west and expecting to go under the canopy then turn right into 'the courtyard' would have been faced with a solid wall. The canopy is a walkway between buildings, with steps up to it from the car park and access from the raised paved area to the south. 'On top' / 'beneath' isn't a sufficient description because from the map the paved area could be a sunken courtyard. There isn't any public access below the paved area. If you know the area then it's obvious; if you don't then it's ambiguous, the main problem being that the normal (in fact, the only) running level round the east of the large building is one storey higher than round the west and north.

As controller, I vetoed this and we used a different site.

But we weren't perfect:

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Runners on 17-18 who headed SE and then tried to follow the line of the '4'-shaped canopy / corridor through the shopping centre found that its connection to the end of the bridge from the multi-storey car-park was above their heads, and that the apparent entrance was a dead-end goods yard. (The ground slopes from N to S, so the northern and eastern entrances to the corridor are at ground level.) Because I'd known that bridge for decades, it never occurred to me that anyone would think that they could get into the shopping centre corridor from the south at road level.

For a mapper with a 2-dimensional piece of paper, 3-dimensional reality is a bitch.

[King Penguin]

Other son, different university .......

[graeme]

As controller, I vetoed this and we used a different site.

Certainly right to do that. But with a mapper/planner could you have adjusted the map to make the courtyard OOB and/or put an uncrossible wall to the west of the canopy?
Or did you need the lower EW cut through later in the course?

Something which always troubles me as a mapper is that I'm invariably choosing what to mark as OOB/crossible before permissions are finalised. On first use, I'm involved enough to change the map if needed, but at subsequent events these things change.

[Arnold]

Of course hindsight is 20/20 so not intending to criticise, but Roger's 17-18 problem seems to have quite an easy solution - you add a bridge / uncrossable wall symbol to the N-S canopy crossing, and dots underneath to indicate you can also cross E-W. If necessary make the bridge artificially wider so you can clearly see the dots?

In summary though as much fun as city races are for runners, they're a giant trap for planners & mappers...certainly a lot more time needed for city race mapping / planning than an equivalent forest event!

[andypat]

certainly a lot more time needed for city race mapping / planning than an equivalent forest event!

I know of a mapper who might disagree with you on the mapping point.

[jac]

If I find small things that are wrong I tell the relevant offical and try to forget about it.

And no good comes of it.

If I find small things that are wrong I tell Nopesport / the club mailing list / the event officials handbook, so that future officials can avoid similar imperfections.

There is much benefit in discussing how things could have been done better. Forgetting the mistakes of the past is likely to lead to repetition.

[andypat]

Nopesport is a good way to get advice regarding possible areas of dubiety pre-event too. I posted on here looking for advice about mapping the long pedestrian bridges at Erskine for our Urban event in April. The comments on here were very helpful - even though there wasnt a consensus (there rarely is on here) it helped us clarify the situation.

[FRBlackSheep]

Rankings?

[King Penguin]

Perhaps waithing for delayed/final confirmation of which courses had legs voided ?
On the day I was told legs were being removed from 3 courses (incl. 4-5 on A and 10-11 on C) but the Controllers comments on GO website say a leg has only been removed from course C.

[Paulo]

Perhaps waithing for delayed/final confirmation of which courses had legs voided ?
On the day I was told legs were being removed from 3 courses (incl. 4-5 on A and 10-11 on C) but the Controllers comments on GO website say a leg has only been removed from course C.

Yes I would presume that course A will have the leg 4-5 splits removed from the results before the rankings are updated - it seems illogical to only remove the affected leg from the C course and not the A course given that both courses were equally affected.

[FRBlackSheep]

I still don't completely understand why the leg needs to be dropped at all? Every competitor had the same information to make a choice of routes from and therefore unsure why there would be a requirement to void the leg?

[King Penguin]

To me the justification is because the inaccessible canopy / crossing point is too easily capable of being misinterpreted on the run. Take a look at the top 6 or so RG plots on course A to see the effect. Those who went round the N end of the hashing pulled well away from those who went for what seems to be an equally valid route at the canopy. A 50/50 decision turned into a significant gain or loss.
(N.B. I was not affected as I was on B, and getting caught out by the locked gate 3 controls from the end was my own fault.)

[FRBlackSheep]

Looking at the canopy i find it difficult to see why you would assume you can run across a canopy linking two non-accessable buildings with no stairs mapped to or from it...

Obviously the fact it wasn't crosshatched causes confusion but then surely this would also apply to the underpasses such as 7-8 that some also missed due to the cross hatching - where do we draw the line on voiding legs?

[Scott]

i find it difficult to see why you would assume you can run across a canopy linking two non-accessable buildings with no stairs mapped to or from it...

Assuming you could run across the canopy would indeed be rather silly, but it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that you could run under the canopy. After all, it's really how all the underpasses beneath the OOB road should have been mapped (as graeme pointed out earlier in this thread, map the main running level etc).

(I didn't get caught out, because I had (probably unfair) local knowledge.)