Nillumbik Emus Orienteering Club  StreetO Training Nights - Results

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Controversy rocks the Monday night series!

Bryce Petersen protested the results of the Monday night event. It seems that their team was deep in strategising mode at the time and did not hear the "everybody finishes at 8:05" announcement. As a result, their runners came in 5 minutes before everybody else. After lengthy email negotiations the organisers recognised that last minute changes are NEVER a good idea and made the following conciliatory offer:

Dear Mr. Petersen,

 

We're dreadfully embarrassed by the confusion that resulted from last night's briefing and feel that we should compensate you for this. We're happy to :

• Refund your entry fee
• Provide you with a free run next week
• Allow you to rerun the event during a free evening this week; if you'd like to do this, let me know and I'll email maps over. If you do this, we'd be happy to adjust the scores.
• Adjust your score if you can think of a fair way to do this.

Please let me know how you'd like to proceed. We're happy to settle out of court.

While not wanting to access the cash-reserves of the series (profitability being such an important aspect of this series), the organisers were prepared to provide an additional incentive by dipping into Judy Hopkin's secret lolly cache in a locked post-box at #28. We'll keep you posted as negotiations with Bryce and Judy continue...

Report

22 people turned up at this Monday's training event. Welcome to Judy and Ellen and Peter who joined the group for the first time this evening. The activity for the evening was TriO (pronounced Tree-O) - one in which a team of three (hence the name) set out with a view to maximising the team score. Individually, this is like a normal score course - but teams got bonus points or multipliers where 2 or 3 members of the same team did the same control.

Congratulations to Ian Dodd, Judy Hopkins and Lauris Stirling for a superb effort - 300 points was an excellent result! The scores are shown below - in winning order by team. Team scores are shown in the first line, personal scores in the second and the last line shows the impact of the bonus system used (i.e. how many extra points your team got and what % of the total this was).

There were lots of strategies tried - Rick had done the maths and worked out a grand scheme where one of us would go North, the other South and he would go around the outside - this seemed to make sense when he said it, but as I walked around the course I became increasingly suspicious of the underlying logic (I was later to find out that Rick does actually have a sense of humour and had plotted this as a practical joke - to see if he could con anybody into using such an outlandish scheme.....we were suckered). As it turned out, Rick had not taken into account the collective IQ of his fellow team-mates as Gordon and I both ended up running South - pretty well the same course initially - and this gave us higher bonus points than might otherwise have been the case. {A comment on strategy - as a walker, my score was 65. If the two runners had done the same course, we would score 65 x 4 for that part of the run = 260. To match our actual score, they would then have needed another 26 points - if they both do this control, they need 9 points worth to do better than we did - - - I studied this for ages this evening and it certainly isn't obvious what the best strategy is).

A highlight of the evening this week was that Judy managed to turn her headlamp on by herself (this was a distinct contrast to the previous week in which she had wandered around asking people to "turn her on". I did jump to her assistance but it proved too much for me - and I was forced to leave it to a younger man. In the finest Samurai tradition Jun, ever the gentleman, leapt to her assistance. Enough on this for now - this is, after all, a General Admittance web site (although we're seriously thinking of applying for an MA15+ rating so we can provide details of some of the more competitive Summer Series events that start in a few weeks).

I walked behind Tina for a while - well, for as long as I could keep up anyway. As she headed up a couple of courts, Judy and I considered waylaying her as she came back out again, but I managed to persuade Judy that this was probably not the right thing to do. In stark contrast to some of the faster walkers in the Eastern Series, her walking style is unchallengeable....look forward to some impressive battles for first place this summer.

Other Notes

We were one walker short this evening - I had been supposed to pick Bernie up near the Railway Crossing at Mont Albert, but things didn't link up as well as they hoped. As a result of this, it seemed only fair to stand in for him to provide a walker to balance the teams up. Sorry Bernie - there is no truth to the rumour that I left you there on purpose so I could take your spot. Sorry Bernie - I hope the walk across to Mont Albert was small compensation for missing out this evening.

Results