Imperial College Park Race 2014 Results
The third race of the London orienteering clubs’ 2014 Park Race series was held around Imperial College, London on Tuesday 17 June.
Lost property
A pair of sunglasses was found and a control description holder left outside the Eastside bar at around 10pm. Please contact Angus Liu <
Planner’s comments
Being an Imperial student means you do get the privilege of wondering around this modern-ish and weird-ish (why on earth did they create a big fenced “hole” next to control #5 on the long course!?) campus on a daily basis, and even then I feel that we under-appreciate the fact that we are in South Kensington (behold the Royal Albert Hall which you all ran past no doubt) AND that this campus has far more intriguing delights to offer than we think (like control #182 which is next to a makeshift toilet block — did you notice that?). Plus you get the odd day of sunshine and behold, an open air play by dramsoc is on the lawn and students are cheerfully drinking away in the union 🙂 Hope you all enjoyed your visit to Imperial.
My ethos in planning this race is to leave no leg just dead running as much as possible and to use the two-levelled and intricate bits of the map to create plenty of map-reading challenges and route choice decisions. The vast amount of trees in Prince’s Gardens provided an ideal place to do some fast-and-furious control picking when tired minds and legs come back for the finish. From what I’ve heard at download and afterwards, a lot of people seemed to have run off the map en route to #1, which is unfortunate (next time read the map scale!), and the two-levelled bits (“Like #5 on the long course!” I hear you cry) posed a good challenge to many, be it first-timers or experienced orienteers. And yet even after getting (so) confused/frustrated, a good deal of people still come back smiling saying they’ve enjoyed the challenge and the rest of the race. Hearing that to me is reward itself 🙂 Thank you all for your kind and encouraging responses. I think the Imperial map is not easy to map-read on the run for a first-timer but the challenge is to map-read as much as you can during running legs to understand what the area is like, and to make good route-choice decisions, especially when you return to an area for the second time. So well done to all who managed that on all, some or even just one of the legs.
Being new to planning, a great bunch of thanks to Ben Smith of SLOW who controlled and co-organised with me, for insightful comments and for test-running my course. Thanks to Sport Imperial for allowing this to happen, fellow Imperialite Sophie Kirk and SLOW’s Paul Couldridge for helping at the start, and to SLOW’s Pete Huzan for helping with control collecting.
It’s great to see Matt D from Imperial finishing in third place. Let’s hope there will be more orienteers at Imperial in years to come, and so bringing you more exciting races on our campus!
Angus Liu