I'm really bored

[pyrat]

Thanks for the attention Gary. I feel honoured

[Seamus]

I think that the Edinburgh Rat Race was great fun, esp. the Saturday night.

yeah got a bit cheesed off with the Sunday, but hey that was the orienteer in me. Next time I shall check the country park map board before setting off on using a 1:50,000 map for a short trail race. It was still a great race; the special stages (novelties) add an extra dimension to them, plus a chance to rest.

In adventure races you notice more, what a valuable job the controller does in orienteering. No disrespect to Gary, I think the course was excellently planned and brilliant, but an independent viewpoint may spot some of these minor errors. They are minor when you think about what the course was made up of and you are marking the map up at 11.20 at night! then again, you could argue some part of rat race comes down to luck, it is just being organised enough to minimise like sleepmonsters were. the 7 P's.

Team Compasspoint will be back next year to contest the nopesport 1, 2, 3. We're due some luck after our unfortunate problems this year. For the first 50 mins we were flying with a great team.

[skyhigh]

Yes, we (sleepmonsters) were organised!! We spent ages marking up the map, checking it, rechecking it etc on Sat night (into early Sunday morning)...and finding the viaduct on the map too! Very happy that the reduced sleep was paid off with the win!!

Who's going to Madchester?

[Adventure Racer]

Podium next year. Nopesport A, B and C.

Accelerate A, B and C might have something to say about that - them and this year's winners

[Kitch]

The alternative to grid refs would be to highlight in the course instruction where you are refering to a specific OS symbol on the map -

eg go to the VIADUCT for the special stage.

make your way to the VIEWPOINT carpark

[Adventure Racer]

Understandably, you're all looking at this from an orienteering perspective, where you rightly expect everything to be very precise. It's not always like that in AR, which is one of the differences from O, as you have often have to work with imprecise maps and instructions, and make the most of all sources of available information. On that point, I imagine it's not natural to ask people for help during an event, which for AR it is perfectly normal - I asked the marshalls about the viaduct on arriving at the transition, and their ignorance told me all I needed to know.

I can understand the issues, but realistically despite being a bit vague, there weren't actually any mistakes in this sections of instructions (later on a couple of "East" instead of "West", but you could work that out from the context too). Instructions shouldn't be deliberately vague either, but whilst they could have been a bit clearer, I don't think this was the case.

Personally, with a befuddled brain in the small hours of Sunday morning I didn't actually remember there was a specific OS viaduct symbol, however I spent considerable time searching the appropriate area of map for something spanning a valley, spotting only the one possibility, and so circled that on my map. Similarly for the viewpoint I spotted the symbol on the OS map - the issue here being that despite having come back on to the street map you briefly left it again. You'll struggle to convince me that either of these was down to luck, given how long I spent (as always) working out these issues.

[pyrat]

Understandably, you're all looking at this from an orienteering perspective, where you rightly expect everything to be very precise. It's not always like that in AR, which is one of the differences from O, as you have often have to work with imprecise maps and instructions, and make the most of all sources of available information. On that point, I imagine it's not natural to ask people for help during an event, which for AR it is perfectly normal - I asked the marshalls about the viaduct on arriving at the transition, and their ignorance told me all I needed to know.

It should be looked at from an orienteering perspective. I doubt it is deliberately vague!

Look out for the upcoming nopesport adventure race. It takes AR to a new level. 1. Precision 2. It only costs £15 per team!

[Toni]

I'm kind of in mixed minds about this one - I do think that one of the challenges of AR is the logistics and preparation - but you can have that without vagueness or lack of precision. While the logistics is one of the things I love, hunting around for controls in the wrong place or that are misleading is a major bugbear.

And I don't accept that this is merely orienteers ranting on that our sport is better (I don't necessarily think it is). But we are used to certain standards where I think that AR's are resigned to this issue - if you talk to the general AR population I am sure you will find it frustrates them too from what I understand - I doubt they all think that inaccuracies, misleading instructions and general vagueness are the best thing about adventure racing.

PS - I haven't seen a map for the RR so have no idea whether this particular example was vague, inaccurate or perfectly reasonable but I think that AR's argument that you have to work with imperfections is a bit negative - yes use all the resources but not put up with imperfections - it kind of says that anything goes because that is what makes it a challenge - what crap!

[Gross]

imperfections that accepts drugs as a regular occurrance in the sport

[bendover]

imperfections that deliberately provoke other nopesport members

[Adventure Racer]

Well at least Gross's post is on-topic with the thread title, as I'm really bored with him.

[ifor]

Personaly I would prefer the precision we normaly get with O. The rest of it is hard enough imprecise instructions, bad maps, things just in the wrong place etc.

Ifor