EASTER COURSE SETTING

Course setting for Easter 2020 2021

BY ANNA FITZGERALD (GOLDSEEKERS)

When we all signed up for course setting for Easter 2020 in late 2018 ..… there was no way we could have guessed that it wouldn’t be until April 2021 that we would be all done and dusted! What a time! Well now that many of you have run our courses, I thought it might be interesting to interview my fellow course setters, to give some insight into how they designed their courses and what impact the extra year might have had.

Prologue CSU Orange – Jean Baldwin

What were the key factors you had in mind when planning your courses for Easter?

I jumped at the chance to set the Sprint courses at CSU. It is an area I know very well, having seen it develop from the old Orange Ag College when we lived on campus, having moved to Orange 30 years ago. We have seen it change through reinventions as University of New England, Sydney University and now Charles Sturt University (CSU). A lot of building works have happened over the years with interesting shapes and lots of garden beds. This all gave a lot of opportunity to design some interesting courses. The added advantage of being on a hill meant lots of steps and ramps to give route choices.

From when you first visited the area to when the event happened, were there many changes to the area?

Before Easter 2020 we were told that a large building for the new medical school was to be built in the centre of the campus. This created dilemmas for course setting but the very large hole in the ground with the safety fence around it was just something we had to live with in 2020. The building was due to be completed in November 2020 so we didn’t anticipate it being a problem when the 2020 Easter Carnival became 2021. In early 2021 we contacted CSU to make sure everything was still OK for us to use the campus for Easter. At first the answer was definitely NO because of COVID restrictions. After some negotiations and assurances that we were all very responsible people, CSU eventually agreed to us holding the event there. Just one small snag – the medical building had been held up and was not yet completed – but it would be by Easter …… We added the new building to the map, behind its safety fence, and updated the gardens around the campus, which had all grown profusely after wonderful rains in the preceding 12 months. There were some particularly odd-shaped garden beds near the new building which had us puzzled until we realized that they were part of a very clever track for wheelchairs which zig-zagged up a 5-metre climb, making it possible for students with a disability to enter the new medical building. The rains became a bit too enthusiastic in the month before the event and we were told we could not park in the paddock that had been selected for us, as it was far too wet. Also, the rain had held up building works, yet again, so the safety fence might still be there at Easter.

After a stressful couple of weeks, we managed to get over all the hurdles and were very happy to hear the comments after the event from one of the elites that the Long course was really good as there was no dead running and you had to think all the way. Anna’s note: I particularly like the route choice from #20 to #21 in the Men’s elite prologue course. Though the time between the runners is not huge, all the fastest runners appeared to take the red route. The red and the green route are not too different in length so what makes the difference? The running on the red route is clear easy running, easy navigation and a direct entry into the control. The green route has more twists and turns and a back turn into the control. But most significantly there are quite a few stairs on the green route. I think the stairs are what makes the difference.

Day 1 Noah’s Ark Ridge – Rodney Parkin

You were the course setter for the Middle Distance event. What were the key factors you had in mind when planning your courses for Easter?

I started with a clear focus on the Orienteering Australia Rules “Profile for a middle-distance event – technical” with emphasis on detailed navigation and finding controls rather than on route choice, and with occasional changes in direction and speed shifts. The technical parts of the map (the rocky parts) form a long thin strip, so keeping it technical essentially forced the courses to zigzag back and forth across the main ridge. The map also has clearer areas “over the back” with log piles and earth mounds which created good opportunities for speed shifts. The OA Rules also strongly encourage a spectator focus at the Arena, ideally with competitors passing through, or at least near the Arena, and easily visible at the Finish. Organisational considerations largely drove the choice of assembly area. I then planned a run-through for at least the elites and chose a spectator control location that most competitors would visit. When coupled with a desire to get the elites as far north on the map as practical, the general flow of the courses started to fall into place.

I’ve been checking out some of the GPS tracking for your event and there were people going everywhere! Were you surprised how many people went off-line and missed the controls? Or was that part of your setting strategy for runners to be lured off-line by other competitors around them?

I could see very early that there was going to be a lot of competitors in a small area. My back-of-the-envelope calculation said there would be around 15,000 legs run in a few hours, mostly in an area quite close to the Arena. The only real option was courses “going everywhere”. The ridge line has an interesting combination of parallel rock lines and parallel clearings that make it easy to lose contact with the map. I tried to capitalise on this by running diagonally through these areas. I also used the more open areas “over the back” to create changes in intensity – a long, easy, fast leg to a control on a log pile or earth mound followed by a fast run back into the complex rock.

Did you have any legs/course that you were particularly pleased with?

I was particularly happy with (control nos) #116 to #117 which appeared on a number of the longer courses (eg control #4 to #5 on course 8, as follows). In most cases there was a longish easy run into and out of #116 followed by a somewhat vague rocky line into #117. There were plenty of subtle cues to follow, but these were easy to miss if you had relaxed too much over the previous easy section. I was also pleased with the Start setup. The main ridge line was hidden from the map collection point. However, after running down to the Start triangle and rounding the end of the rock line, the competitor was presented with an imposing complex of rock. Unfortunately, my desire to get the longer courses quickly to the north of the map limited what I could do with them, but many courses went straight into the rock there, requiring some fast comprehension. (eg see the following from course 5.)

COURSE 8

You had a small but tricky map. What were the main COURSE 5 challenges you came across when setting courses in this area?

A mature map came quite late in the planning for the event – the complexity of the rock meant it was fairly slow to map, and there were a couple of iterations of checking and improvement. Early on in the course setting I was working from versions of the map that were very much drafts. As the map matured it became apparent that it would be almost unreadable at 1:10,000. As the rules require a scale of 1:10,000 (at least for elites), we needed to get a waiver on the rules to allow us to use a 1:7500 map for them. This didn’t come until fairly late in the planning. The technical rock was long and thin with a couple of awkward pinch points (eg 300m NW of the Start triangle) where there would be a lot of competitors in a relatively narrow corridor. As noted above, I needed to manage having a lot of competitors in a small area – quite a few times I needed to go back to the estimated control loads and rework courses to reduce the load on the busiest controls/legs. I was also quite conscious of the needs of the older competitors with reduced agility (M70/W65 and over). I needed to be careful not to force them into areas that were too steep or rocky.

From when you first visited the area to when the event happened, were there many changes to the area?

There were massive changes to the vegetation. At my first familiarisation visit (early 2019), visibility was fairly limited and I based my control location choices on that. By early 2020 the drought had reduced the area almost to bare earth, with much of the vegetation reduced to sticks. In the lead-up to Easter 2020 I feared that the courses would be way too easy because many control sites were visible from a long way away. The rains during 2020 turned it all around again – by mid-2020 the vegetation made it almost impossible to drive into the parking paddock, and by the time of the event visibility was almost back to where it was in 2019.

In fact, it was only when putting out control stands seven weeks prior to the event that we discovered that the Easy and Very Easy courses we had tagged for 2020 had become so overgrown as to be unusable. This forced a very late rework of these two courses.

Any other comments/anecdotes you’d like to add?

The winning times were mostly somewhat longer than I anticipated. I suspect the limited opportunities for bush orienteering during COVID has left many people not very “match fit”. However, I was very pleased by the many very positive comments I received – I think there was an almost universal relief at being able to get back into competing in this sort of tricky terrain.

Day 2 Gumble Pinnacles – Eric Morris

What were the key factors you had in mind when planning your courses for Easter?

So many things! The important ones were route choice, technical complexity, ensuring a variety of challenges on each course and getting length and climb right (the length was an issue on some courses). Then there are the logistics – water, potential video and radio, working around the agreed Start and Finish points, load through the different controls, having different sequences of controls on different courses and all this planned under the uncertainty created by COVID-19. Also worth noting, it is an easy area to set challenging courses for the fit and experienced, but presents problems for courses suiting the less experienced, particularly kids.

I was checking out some of the GPS tracking and I really liked the route choices on some of the legs on the women’s elite course. It was great to see the competitors choosing different route choices. Did you see anyone taking route choices that surprised you?

Yes. Mainly in that on some legs I expected 80% of the field to choose one route and 20% another but often these percentages were reversed. Perhaps that comes from my advantage having studied the map and been out in the forest so much. There were a few really odd choices runners took here and there but they were clearly slower than the routes I expected. One particularly interesting (and tough) leg on most of the elite courses did surprise me. I didn’t test run the leg but there was a clearly good route that no one who wore a tracker or uploaded a route took across all the elite courses (route in yellow). I’m certain this was the fastest route!

Did you have any legs/course that you were particularly pleased with?

There was a common radio control on most red courses near the assembly area that was the start of a long leg. I had a few different long legs starting here but the one I liked the most featured on some of the medium length red courses.

Why was it good? It was tough. Most competitors had little opportunity to plan (because of the complex early challenges), it required an important decision right from the start and all routes were challenging with different challenges at different points. In particular, if you took the N-S track, the longer you stayed on the track, the further you ran and the longer the climb into the control. I’m still not sure what the best route was! I also liked the far west loop on the longer courses (M21E shown here). It featured a range of short and short medium legs through many different forest types with many different challenges in navigation, speed, concentration and micro route choice.

How much of an effect do you think the extra “COVID” year had on the courses (runnability and competitor’s fitness/ metal prowess)?

Lots. Some of the courses ended up a bit too long, the COVID-19 impact on fitness and technique, the heat, lack of water and extra forest growth since the area was last used, and over 12 months of good rainfall all added a little bit extra to the physical and mental challenge.

Any other comments/anecdotes you’d like to add?

Two comments: Firstly, it was interesting and informative to see how the best orienteers attacked the courses. If you want to improve your technique, I would strongly recommend talking to these competitors about how they attacked each leg AND the whole course, particularly with a focus on how to reduce risks and deal with the most dangerous challenges. Secondly, I appreciated all the positive comments I received after the race and acknowledge the several slightly critical ones about the challenge being just a bit too tough in some places.

Day 3 Gumble Pinnacles – Anna Fitzgerald

As for me, well I had the more open area. I was actually worried that it might be too easy given that the visibility was so good, but perhaps I shouldn’t have worried.

What were the key factors I had in mind when planning my courses for Easter?

My main aim in setting my courses was to try to even the tables ..… wanting to reward the accurate navigator as well as the fast orienteer - not be biased towards one or the other. When I started course setting I was aware that I was setting the elite courses to be ‘relay’ length (long middle distance). The thought of it being ‘relay style’ stuck in my head and so when I was setting all the courses, instead of middle or long-distance style I aimed to have relay style courses with multiple controls close together, with different courses visiting the controls in different order. Initially we were hoping we might have over 1,000 entries and if everyone was starting in waves of around 23 competitors in each start, it was likely that competitors would all be pretty close in time when passing through the first few controls. Having relay-style ‘splits’ would help make the open area trickier with distractions from other runners, not quite running to the same controls, luring competitors off-line. The next consideration was how to approach the bush area. I was keen to send runners through the tricky, low visibility bush areas to add some contrast to the fast open running. But should it happen early or late on the course? I decided that to visit the open areas first and then the bush was perhaps the trickiest as runners are likely to be more tired after the faster terrain and those that don’t adjust their speed as they move into the bush were likely to lose time if they didn’t navigate carefully. On top of this, the controls in the bush area were also split with several controls slightly off-line with each other to encourage the less confident runners to lead each other off-line. I wanted to do this great map justice, aiming to make the course as tricky as possible, it was a national Easter final day, after all. My only regret was not including any real route choice legs. But following the GPS and watching some runners spiking all controls, while others were lured off-line ..… I feel my work here was done.

What had changed since 2020?

Thistles! These only affected the easy and very easy courses, but in a big way. We couldn’t access one of the control sites due to waist-high thistles (Very easy competitor height!). Thankfully, we were able to get a slasher in to make a new path through. But we certainly could have done with even more clearing ..… I think even from a month before the event to the event the thistles seemed to have gotten taller and multiplied! The other change I noticed was with me. When I picked up the maps again after the ‘COVID year’, I couldn’t help but feel that the courses were so busy, so many controls! My first temptation was to simplify the courses. Having not orienteered for so long, my brain was thinking that it seemed too tricky. But after all the hard work in setting the first time. Hilary and I decided to keep the 2020 courses.

What course was I most proud of?

The courses that I was most proud of were the shorter hard courses. They were the first courses that I set (they impacted on where the Start could go to get the most interesting courses) and the ones I spent the most time designing. There is a great challenge in setting a short course that is still challenging, but not too steep. Hopefully, the balance was about right.

Any other comments?

I would like to make special thanks to Hilary, my controller, who helped me to keep on track and stopped me over-analysing what might happen on the day. I would also like to thank the two overseas contributors to my courses: • my sister Jane Pulford who checked out the courses and whilst visiting from the Netherlands, pre-COVID, test ran a course in ridiculously hot conditions (I suspect it is always on the warm side in Molong!) • Julian Dent (former Australian WOC representative) who did a desk review of the courses and suggested the addition of what I fondly thought of as the ‘Julian Dent control’ to the elite courses (control #26). It seemed moderately diabolical and I couldn’t resist adding it to the courses - great suggestion, thanks Julian. I hope all the elites enjoyed the additional challenge at the end of their courses. Thank you to everyone for running our courses. We hope you enjoyed the challenge.