Paul Couldridge wins the 2016 Spring Handicap

The final race of the the 2016 Spring Series was held at the CompassSport Cup Qualifying round at Hollands Wood in the New Forest. SLOW narrowly failed to qualify for the final, but Paul Couldridge produced one of the standout runs of the day with a win by over two minutes over someone half his age on the Short Brown course.

That performance earned him sufficient ranking points to edge Andrea Rebora into second place, and for Paul to win SLOW’s 2016 Spring Handicap series by five points. Charlotte Turner was third two points back, with Raffaella Marin in fourth seeing the Rebora-Marin household very well-represented in the final standings.

The spring series handicap is designed to reward runners improving on their previous year’s performance, which means that it is usual to see a different name on the trophy each year.

An overdue mention should go to Matt Schepisi who won SLOW’s 2015 Spring Series, with Andy Robinson in second place and Rob Patterson in third. The series results were only calculated in 2016 – apologies to him for the delay.

Past winners are:

  • 2015: Paul Couldridge
  • 2015: Matt Schepisi
  • 2014: Dorte Torpe Hansen
  • 2015: Katie McInnes

Many thanks to SOC for producing some wonderful weather for us to run in this last weekend, and to CHIG, BKO, MVOC and HH for hosting the first four events.

The scoring is a handicap based on both runners’ average performance in 2015 and their variability. The ranking points that they are awarded are normalised to see how far they were above (or below) their expected score. This is similar in concept to the ranking system used by British Orienteering, and allows us to compare results across courses. Competitors points above expectation are then ranked and scored from 100 down, similar to our other competitions. This rewards consistency rather than one-off high-scoring runs.