OMM

[Jethro]

Doug Tullie has, more or less, recovered from his cold so is good to go for this weekend. However Oleg Chepelin has had to withdraw due to a foot injury post SHI's. His place is taken by Al Anthony, a noted Scottish hillrunner. He may lack some of the navigational ability of the "mad Russian" but three wins in the SHR Long Classics series, including the Pentland Skyline just recently, suggests he will not seriosly weaken that team!

[ifor]

Going to be a burn up again tomorrow by the look of it.

1 6:01:38 35 Tim Higginbottom & Chris Near
2 6:07:38 59 Douglas Tullie & John Rocke
3 6:07:57 63 Duncan Archer & Shane Ohly
4 6:09:01 62 Steve Birkinshaw & Jethro Lennox
5 6:17:12 57 Tom Owens & Alasdair Anthony
6 6:36:40 67 Hector Haines & Jack Wood

[ER]

Awful, awful weather yesterday. Constant rain with frequent heavier bursts, cloud and mist entering the valleys at times. Wild and remote area too.

It has stopped raining, clouds on the tops but everywhere looking glorious in Autumn colours -hoping everyone has a great second day out in the hills and comes home safe and sound. There will be lots of epic tales to share post race and in the dark evenings of winter to come.

[Pippa]

Sprint finish on Elite:

1st Duncan and Shane (superstars)
2nd Tim and Chris (10 seconds behind)
3rd Doug and John

Think Steve and Jethro must have come 4th. Duncan was a bit excited on the phone and kept getting names muddled up!

Proud wife pippa

[ba-ba]

Excellent stuff from Duncan and Shane, and John and Doug as well!

From Jethro's twitter it appears they punched the wrong penultimate control on day 1 - same feature but 100m away (1:40k map) and were docked 30mins.

Went to wrong penultimate checkpoint on day 1 less than 100m, on same feature. Given 30 minute time penalty. Went from 1st to 4th.

then again none of the others did...

[Angry Haggis]

Awful, awful weather yesterday. Constant rain with frequent heavier bursts, cloud and mist entering the valleys at times. Wild and remote area too.

Isn't this pretty standard for the OMM? Or was this notably different to normal?

[Scott]

Nice event. I was subbing in for someone at the last minute of the C course, and quite enjoyed the new format - it made things a bit more interesting.

I thought the terrain was a bit more runnable than in the last couple of years - short heather and the occasional peat hag, but no man-eating tussocks - but there was also rather more navigation required due to the clag, which no doubt played to the advantage of the orienteers. Saturday was a bit wet, but not unusually so - certainly much pleasanter than (eg.) Saunders 2010!

[Paul Frost]

I've uploaded the Day 1 files to the OMM RouteGadget, which is here:
www.omm.routegadget.co.uk

I'm still waiting on the files for day 2, but will post here when they are available.

[Freefall]

Day 1 route up on the Medium Score. Not a lot of distance, quite a bit of climb but happy with the points total given the bad state of my knee. Limped home on Sunday into 71st position. Sunday newspaper featured an article on using stem cells to replace cartilage - if I could use son Rory's (5th on the B Course) that would be even better. One of the better KIMM/OMM areas in my opinion, and good for us navigators.

[Jon Brooke]

The penultimate control situation for Steve and Jethro was very odd and I'm still not sure what the right outcome was.

Essentially there were 2 controls, placed about 100 meters apart on a small stream running down the side of a valley - the top one was at the stream source and very near an obvious fence, the bottom one was just on the stream, but a bit lower - maybe 30 meters vertical drop. People were all approaching from below and the elite course went to the top control.

Personally I think it was a pretty poor bit of control placement.

Steve and Jethro were doing an awsome run. They started 8 minutes behind us and overtook us heading into the 2nd control going like the clappers. If they'd not mispunched they would have finished in 5.39 - 20 minutes up on the field.

However, we came into the control the same way as Steve and Jethro, thought it seemed a bit low and not on the fence, checked the control code and then went up to the right control.

To start with they were listed as mp in the results but later on they were reinstated with a 30 minute penalty. At that point, and having seen how fast they were going earlier I thought that they would still win on day 2 and that whoever came second might be a bit pissed off. But as it happens I think (Steve said) that they had some nav issues on day 2, which is probably just as well, and maybe overall things turned out fair.

OTOH I think prizes go down to 6th place and Steve and Jethro ended up 4th, so maybe the OMM organisers should (if they haven't already) make up the prizes of 5th, 6th and 7th to one place higher.

Pity really, as there was no need for the controls to be like that. There were plenty of other sites available nearby that could have worked and on the whole we thought that the control placement was really good elsewhere in terms of technicality with pretty good representation on the map.

[Jon Brooke]

Congrats to Shane and Duncan BTW - spoke to Shane after and I'm not quite sure he could believe it.

[Paul Frost]

All the Day 2 RouteGadgets now uploaded.
www.omm.routegadget.co.uk
Apologies for the delay, but I didn't get the files until 2pm.

[madmike]

Isn't this pretty standard for the OMM? Or was this notably different to normal?

Day 1 was as bad as anything bar Borrowdale Day 1 during the last 6 or 7 years particularly high up.

Some other really good results from orienteers included DM & Son with a convincing win on the D course. Andy L and RichR failing to win C by more than 2 hours! Scorah and Besant winning B. Taylor and Hodkinson winning A.

Clean sweep for orienteers on the line courses

[frog]

Mel and Graham Nicoll from Tay were 6th in the medium score event.

[The Loofa]

Weather was pretty average for a KIMM. Besides Borrowdale the last baddish one was 2005 Eastern Lakes. Otherwise things have been pretty easy since then.

Timing question. Did anyone else think that day 2 start from MS/SS camp was 45 seconds slow. i.e. 75% of teams with penalties should have 2 points more.