Compass Sport Cup – Results

Update 21st February – minor amendments to published results (reinstating 2 competitors). No change in position of any clubs in Cup or Trophy competitions. WinSplits and Routegadget will not be updated.

Individual

Individual – by course (all)

Individual – by course (Cup & Trophy separate)

SPORTident – live results

WinSplits – legs before the timed out crossing may not display correct splits. Overall times are correct.

Routegadget – draw your route!

Team

Cup and Trophy Results

SPORTident – team – live results

Congratulations to the following clubs, who qualify for the finals:

Organiser’s Comments

Many thanks to all the SLOW members, but especially to Alan Leakey and Gordon Parker, who helped with the Esher event today, some  of you may even have volunteered.  With the split starts and a major road crossing it was a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to get enough people helping at the right time.  I hope everybody enjoyed their run on Esher Common and saw some bits they had not seen before. It is a lovely area. The car park worked out well, so thanks to the Fairmile Inn giving permission for the use of the their fields.  

Andrew Trimble

Planner’s Comments

Overview

When I accepted the role of Planner for this event for this event, I took two steps. The first was to look to move the centre of gravity to the opposite end of Esher Commons from our previous event in October 2022 in order to give everyone a race with a different feel. This decision was reinforced when we got permission for the car parking fields at the Fairmile Inn, which would still be usable in the depths of winter and let us have the Finish at Assembly. The second was to look at the area in detail in February 2023 in order to get a good feel for the possibilities. At this stage the north-west was relatively dry and although the brambles had grown since dramatic thinning work the year before there were still some really challenging straight running legs possible. Unfortunately, the inexorable growth of the brambles continued right through 2023 and into last December, and a wetter winter completed the job of making many legs unviable, so the Controller and I agreed I that would have to rework things. At this late stage I didn’t want to do a complete replan of the event because of the risk of drastic mistakes so I cut out the controls and legs from the very northern part and added others in some of the nicer bits. That still left a lot more splashing in wet forest and muddy paths than I would have liked but took out the really vile parts.

Glitches

• On Course 2 the Finish was missing from the map and the Control Descriptions. Checking back through my files I can see that it was there in early versions of the courses but somehow got deleted right near the end of the Planning process. Fortunately, with a taped run in, the vast majority of runners just kept going and ran to the Finish. For the few that didn’t, and thought that control 200 was the Finish (!), we accepted that the error was ours and reinstated them with an average run-in time. This did not affect any of the team results.
• On Course 4 the line between Controls 17 and 18 completely obscured a large part of a path. Both the controller and I had thoroughly checked maps for where line breaks/adjustments were needed but in this case the line so completely obscured the path that it is hard to see the issue even on a large magnification on the screen. Fortunately, the beginning of the path was visible, and everyone seemed to find the best route anyway.
• Control 222. This was a concrete block. The Control Description was given as a Knoll when it should have been Boulder. A few people commented on this, but it only seemed to result in a few seconds hesitation at most. This was a late addition control as a result course replanning (see below). Which shows the risk of making late changes.

Safety

The overriding safety issue was that I couldn’t have the junior courses (8A, 8B, 9A & 9B) crossing the A road, with its bursts of fast traffic, even with a time out, so they were constrained to the western half of the area. This was mainly an issue for 8A, fitting in the required Green standard course of 5k. The second issue related to courses 7 and 10 where there were slopes and marshes that I did not want to take the veterans (and in particular the less agile ones). Of course, these factors aren’t always obvious from the map but avoiding them meant that these courses had more dull bits than I would have liked.

THANK YOUs

Thank you to the seventeen (yes 17) Control Hangers and Collectors from SLOW who got up extra early or stayed let to make sure controls got put out in time and brought back in promptly.

And a big thank you to Kieran Devine (BAOC, a non CompassSport Cup club) for stepping in as Controller and preventing a lot more glitches than actually happened. And for those of you who got wet feet in the North West part of the map – think of Kieran having to wade around checking control sites 😊

Alan Leakey