Essex Stragglers Orienteering Society (SOS)

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Regional Colour Coded event incorporating East Anglian League
Baddow Ridge
Sunday 28th January 2018
Final Results

Officials' Comments

Organiser - Nancy Powell Davies, powell.davies@btinternet.com

What a beautiful day we had! The sun even peeped out for a short while. Thank you to everyone who came. I hope you enjoyed the woods which seemed to be at their best and didn't notice the few glitches that we had.

I'm REALLY grateful to those SOS members who came and helped as well as having a run if they wanted to. They all carried out their tasks excellently, dealing with those glitches quickly and expertly. I was left to sit back and enjoy my coffee and a piece of cake from the SOS Juniors stall.

At the end I was passed a mis-matched pair of adult gloves so, if you are suffering from cold hands, please let me know.

Planners - Nina and Clive Tant

"Squeeze" is the operative word for many elements of this event. As Kevin Machin explains below, the coppicing work in Blakes Wood left us with little alternative but to squeeze all but the longer courses into Lingwood Common and Lingwood. Nina and I found ourselves with a real squeeze on time available and the essential changes to what was left of the map was a squeeze for Kevin, who also produced/amended the map. Late notification of sensitive areas in the eastern area meant late changes to the planned courses and another squeeze on sleeping hours. Finally, short green was squeezed out of using the eastern area and into Lingwood and the Common because of the distance between the areas. We did what we could to get the technical difficulty right for the senior courses and found that perhaps the Lingwood area has more to offer than we previously thought. Nevertheless, it is the eastern area which has the quality conditions and it remains my dream that one day we shall be able to hold the entire Baddow Ridge event in that area. Thanks to all who helped make this event work and, as so often is the case, a very special thanks to Kevin for such a huge amount of commitment.

Controller - Kevin Machin (SOS)

It was great to have a warmer and drier day than there was the previous weekend. Despite recent rain the common and forest were not too muddy if you were able to avoid the main tracks and the recent cold weather has put paid to the dense bramble that can persist in these parts. With this in mind, it should have made for fast running. Clive planned excellent challenging courses. He was determined to get as many as possible into the Eastern half of Baddow Ridge as this presents the most runnable and most undulating part of the area. I hope that those on the longer courses appreciated the area. The cost for this was the road link section. The decision was made to time this section out due to the potential hazard of traffic where there was no pavement available for runners to use. It was felt that this should not eat into the course lengths, which is why these courses were 1.1km longer. What we may not have appreciated was the extra climb that this would entail, and so the courses were a little more physical than ought to have been the case. Apologies for that, especially for those on the Green course on whom it had the greatest impact. It is of course unusual in Essex to ever have to worry about climb, but Danbury does offer that challenge. I would like to thank the competitors that found the control that was found up a tree rather than in the depression where it had been originally put. This meant that the control was only missing for the first three runners, who have been reinstated, and saved many runners a lot of angst and saved me from having to void any courses. The challenge for the shorter courses was to fit Orange, Light Green and Short Green into a fairly narrow strip of land. I think Clive and Nina achieved this really well though it did mean quite a bit of climb running up and down the slope. I would like to thank Nancy for her calm nature and excellent organisational abilities to get everything and everyone ready with the minimum of worry, and also to Clive and Nina for planning such well received courses in what was a very short timeframe.

Just a note of explanation as to why Blakes Wood was not used. The National Trust have taken it upon themselves to carry out coppicing of the woodland at a rate which seems to exceed the ability of the woodland to recover, resulting in large areas of the woodland becoming overgrown and unusable. Hopefully in time the area will start to recover and we will be able to enjoy it once more.

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