Gross wrote:Hermes wrote:Do we even need to be punching? Can't we just have events for the enjoyment of orienteering?
Depends if you want a sport or a recreation.
Whilst it would be a little bit of a pain, manual punching could be done away with completely and have people writing down a letter or code at each control. For the start and finish, every competitor could be manually timed by volunteers who from a distance (or closer in cars) would be able to record race numbers, which would be reusable for other events and can be sent prior to the race in the post. Competitors would also be encouraged to record their routes on gps if possible and upload to routegadget or similar for at least some splits analysis.
This would lend itself to planning courses with fewer controls on each course than seems normal now (often too many!), I wouldn't want to be stopping to write something down every 2 minutes on a 30 control 60min course.
And to start with as a first step, would clubs be prepared to leave controls out for up to a week or two and let people print their own maps out for them, and then just have informal results table from people recording their own times? I'm just a bit worried that fussing over the logistics of putting on proper events now may delay what seems like a very simple short term solution to get people back into the forest!