Oxford City Race

Saturday 20th October 2012

Comments

I am a keen Sprint orienteer as I enjoy the challenge of having to navigate at a much higher speed than is usually possible in a forest, while making route choice decisions which can make or break your race. I also enjoy longer distance Urban orienteering, often for the same reasons. However, I have sometimes found myself becoming rather bored during these races because there may be many long legs with fairly simple left-or-right route choice options, which, when made, reduce the remaining minutes of the leg to a plain running race.

My aim when planning the Oxford City Race was to show that it is possible to have a long urban race in which courses did the opposite of this; didn't let you switch off, and were constantly challenging to keep you interested. I thought it was important to test a variety of skills, so that you would need to adapt your orienteering approach for different sections of the course. More than anything, I hope that you didn't get bored!

My apologies if you felt that course 2 was a little overplanned. In hindsight, the actual running distance was longer than I estimated, and was not much less than that of course 1. Hopefully you were still enjoying yourself near the end and your legs feel ok by Monday morning!

I would like to congratulate the winners on the day, and anybody who managed to find all the fastest routes through the Engineering triangle and St Anne's college.

I would also like to thank the organising team of Alan Cherry (organiser), Ben Stevens (organiser #2), Neville Baker (controller), Ian Webb (mapper) and Jon Marsden (IT guru who put up with my ridiculous number of controls). Without them the event could never have taken place.

This is the first major event I have planned, so if you have any comments (good or bad) I would really appreciate them.

I hope to see you orienteering at an OUOC event again in the future.

Peter Hodkinson
peter.hodkinson@st-annes.ox.ac.uk


We hope you enjoyed the race and thanks for taking part. Especially thanks to TVOC for lending us some kit, St John's ambulance for attending, and to all the volunteers - two hours of marshalling was probably quite boring! It all seemed to go fairly smoothly on the day for us, apart from the mad rush for numbers and SI cards at about 10:00am, and the problem with the printer we brought for results that resulted in the planner (Peter) going to fetch a printer from his room followed by me going to my room to download a driver for it onto a USB stick! Thanks to Jon Marsden for managing all the SI complications. Also thanks to Trinity and St Anne's for letting us use their colleges, as well as Wycliffe Hall, Oxford Castle, the University Club, Oxford City Council, the University Security Services and Proctors (Science Area) and the University Parks staff for permissions. This is what me, Alan and Peter spent a significant amount of the organisation time on!

Ben Stevens
ben.stevens@merton.ox.ac.uk
 

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