Contribution

[SeanC]

What's wrong with the quoting software today?

However I am fairly thick skinned and insensitive.

IanD and myself are from the South East BTW, or I don't get the joke

[graeme]

At my first event I was given some rudimentary instructions and told to run white.
I blundered into my first control about half a mile before I expected it.
Five minutes later I was done.
I then had some understanding of map scale, what was marked, what I was looking for, how visible the flags were and how to orient the map on the run. And I'd seen people running off trail in the woods and knew what was reasonable expectation.
In other words all the essentials which a novice doesn't know.
I was then able to thoroughly enjoy a more technical course.

Adults running junior courses is a problem, if a fit adult turns up, what do you give them?

White. Then whatever they feel capable of afterwards.

[Paul Frost]

Adults running junior courses is a problem, if a fit adult turns up, what do you give them?

White. Then whatever they feel capable of afterwards.

Or as I said, yellow.
In EckOland we struggle to find enough line features for yellow, let alone white.

[Red Adder]

Paul,

I happily swap you 20 km of paths for 10 km of contours and a couple of dozen assorted point features ( and you can have 5 hectares of very recent [last Tuesday] brashings for free)

RA

[SeanC]

Someone else said "Adults running junior courses is a problem, if a fit adult turns up, what do you give them?"

Then...

White. Then whatever they feel capable of afterwards.

That's OK, but the problem is that newcomers are quite likely to have finished their white course after or as registration is closing, especially at the Saturday type of colour coded event which have a smaller start window, that's if the person at download/registration remembers to remind the newcomer that they can do another course. Our SI hero also tells of horrible complications if the newcomer uses the same SI Card for different courses.

Our "simple score" events are basically a yellow/orange/light green course shoved together to make a score, so once the Graeme type beginner has finished the a few 60's (white) and got the general hang of things he can continue to the harder ones without pausing for breath. By the time he finishes he should be on the more interesting off path controls and will hopefully begin to understand the point and be hooked. It's not so good for the IanD type beginner, though it does allow us to offer training/coaching straight after the event where Ian could be sent out for another 30 minutes.

An "information point" or "person to meet and greet" is also good at colour coded events, but that's another 2 volunteers to find, which might not be so straightforward at a small local event, especially for small clubs. If you have a mass start and get people there early, all the regulars can be meet and greeters. No need to get volunteers before hand... just hand out "ask me for help" bibs to a few friendly faces who turn up on the day. The organiser can re-inforce the points at the pre-race briefing and any still confused beginners can be held back after the start for extra help when the organiser says "does anyone need extra help" at the pre-event briefing.

Because everyone finishes together, there is a good chance that the beginners will talk to those that helped them before the event and be made to feel more welcome. If there is an excuse to stay and chat, eg prizegiving or cafe/pub then that's perfect.

I think it's generally underestimated in orienteering how intimitating trying something new can be for adults. Maybe that's just how I feel? People are used to doing what they are used to doing and trying something new can take courage.

[Paul Frost]

Thanks Red Adder, but what we really need is a nice park, I don't think there is a single one in the whole of Argyll, and certainly not near Oban.
So we are never going to be able offer "Community O" in a nice friendly location with changing/showering facilities.

And we certainly don't need any brashed areas, they seem to be chopping down every tree in Argyll at the moment. We lost part a part of a map that had only just been re-mapped only last week. You can read what happened on the EckO website The event that Almost Never Was

[Scott]

Our SI hero also tells of horrible complications if the newcomer uses the same SI Card for different courses.

This used to be an issue, but the current version of Autodownload is perfectly happy to let you reuse an SI card on different (or the same) courses at the same event, although I think it still gets a bit fiddly on OE2010.

[Darwin]

10,000 people did the local "Tough Mudder" here in June - there is a demand for challenge out there - and I wonder if we are missing it in the way we introduce people to the sport.

The very first orienteering course I did was M21B(S) in a big badge event (they were in those days) at Finsthwaite - definitely TD5. As I was asking about the start protocol, a woman tried to put me off, but I went ahead and two hours later was totally hooked and have been ever since. At the next event I entered the A(L) course.

Had I been persuaded to run around some tracks for half an hour on a beginners course, I'd probably have gone back to climbing and fellrunning with a confirmed view that orienteering was a bit naff/tame.

Maybe there is too much emphasis on mollycoddling newcomers into the sport? We should absolutely be friendly, welcoming and helpful, but not patronise. Lay out the options and let the beginner choose the level of challenge they want. They can follow a simple safety bearing if totally lost - where's the risk?

[EddieH]

Brilliantly put Darwin. I fully concur. I was NOT a runner - in fact I detested running, but I loved the adventure.

Ironically I quite enjoy TD3 now but absolutely not then.

[mappingmum]

We should absolutely be friendly, welcoming and helpful, but not patronise. Lay out the options and let the beginner choose the level of challenge they want.

Yes.

[AndyO]

We should absolutely be friendly, welcoming and helpful, but not patronise. Lay out the options and let the beginner choose the level of challenge they want.

Yes.

I absolutely agree with the statement when read in total. That means welcoming, laying out the options and letting the beginner make an informed choice. My first course (coming back to the sport after a 30+ year absence since school) was a Green, and I was out for a while, but really enjoyed it. I didn't know anything about the hieroglyphs of Control Descriptions, but I reckoned that if I went to the right place and found a flag with the right code number I was in the right place. Sometimes that still works to this day

It reinforces the need (if it were necessary) to have good people doing the meeting and greeting and at registration, and because that can be any club member, we all have that responsibility.

[SeanC]

Someone on this thread said that one of the problems with score events is the risk of following. Well it's interesting to look at the animation on route gadget for SLOW's Aldgate/Bank score event. You can select 20 competitors, quite a few with similar scores and there's almost no following after the first one or two controls (which is my experience with Kent Night Cup events). There might even be more following at popular cross country events where groups of similar ability orienteers start close together.

The animation reminds me of the classic 80's game "pac-man".

I thought route gadget couldn't do score events, Is this a first?

[Paul Frost]

RouteGadget can indeed handle Score events.
There are different methods for how to achieve it though.
It looks like the SLOW event didn't have splits, so may not have used electronic controls.
On the RouteGadget UK site I have some video tutorials that show the different processing methods.

If you check out any of the OMM score courses you will see how it can work, with notes on how best to view routes.

[Angry Haggis]

It looks like the SLOW event didn't have splits, so may not have used electronic controls

We use SI for the start and the finish, to act as timing to record how long people are out for. However controls are the normal Street-O pen-and-paper clues. Note the SLOW Street-Os have starts at 30s/1m intervals over the course of an hour (or more), they are not mass start, so any following on the Routegadget animation is purely coincidental! By default, the "mass start" checkbox is ticked on Routegadget.

There is a link to the RG for the race here by the way: http://sloweb.org.uk/racereports/aldgate-streeto-routegadget/

The main difficulty is getting the results in the correct format for RG manually - as we are not using laptops or software to run the events, we are mimicing the OEntries format but this means having to include a lot of unnecessary data.

Now that the process is set up though, we'll be using SI and RG for our next Street-O in December and of course for our bigger OK Nuts Trophy race later this month.

On a slightly different technology-related topic, we have started using Facebook events for our Street-Os and other races. It is worth noting that we had 57 people had signed up to say they were coming to the Aldgate/Bank Street-O, on the Facebook event, for a total of 90 at the actual event.

[SeanC]

Note the SLOW Street-Os have starts at 30s/1m intervals over the course of an hour (or more), they are not mass start,

Woops, I guess that rather destroys my evidence.

It is worth noting that we had 57 people had signed up to say they were coming to the Aldgate/Bank Street-O, on the Facebook event, for a total of 90 at the actual event.

I know this is not the only aim of the SLOW Facebook page, but is there any evidence of new people turning up to these events by finding out about them on Facebook?