andypat wrote:Gross wrote:
Also I can't see how there will ever be a shortage of start slots on short green in the majority of competitions in Scotland.... a 2 hour start window gives 120 1 minute start slots.
Yeah but that wasn't the criteria. It was one course for everything below short blue, which is green, short green and very short green. Granted you still might have just about enough start slots but it'd be close. And I do think the difference between green and very short green is important and going to become importanter as we all get older.
Taking your example of the 5.15km Green course, the Short Blue would be about 5.95km (assuming the climb scaled in proportion). I imagine that, given a choice between that Short Blue and a Very Short Green, a number of the competitors whose "ideal" course is Green would chose to run Short Blue. Similarly, given my selection of courses I'd expect some of the "Brown competitors" to choose to run Black rather than Short Brown.
The basic formula for deciding which TD5 courses to offer shouldn't be too complicated: plan the longest course in the guidelines that the area will accommodate, the shortest course in the guidelines, and no more courses between those two than are needed to ensure that there are enough start slots and that the jump in length between any two courses isn't too large.
One of the big disadvantages of the colour-coded system is that it's easy to get too hung up on course length ratios, winning times, and offering a "full range of colour-coded courses". It would do us no harm to accept a bit more variation. Of course entrants need to have some idea what they're letting themselves in for, but it doesn't need to be quite so exact, and it doesn't need to be the same at every race.