Monday Night Fun Running

Terrific course Ian - while the route choices from the start were a tad limited, runners soon split up as some chose to drop into the centre early to pick up 8, 23 and 1 before doing the controls on the right hand side of the map. Many noted that while #17 (NE corner of map) was worth 5 points, it was a long, long way out and back - and chose to go directly to #24 instead.

There were several newcomers this evening - welcome to Sid, Gedo (pronounced Jed?), Alison who took part for the first time this evening and also to Stacii Vo who took part in her first training event. Alison and Gedo did well - visiting 19 of the 25 controls this evening. Sid did well to visit 18 controls, but suffered some time penalties as a result of arriving back late. (Folks - please drop me an email at geoff@orienteering.com.au and I'll put you on our Monday Runners mailing list). Our apologies for the somewhat terse briefing - as 7:00pm approaches, we need to be focussed on briefing participants, gathering warm tops, keys etc, making sure keys are in the car and that everyone has a score-card and some manner of writing on it or punching holes in it and locking the car.

On the subject of car-locking - there were no problems with the keys this evening - although several people were a tad sceptical after last week and took their keys around with them this week (and nobody can blame them for this...). If you haven't tried the key-safe, please have a go at the next event - be confident that you know how to open it...just in case you do need to at some time in the future.

Course-Setter  -  Ian Davies
(File photo - pretending not to be lost at Darebin)

Thanks to Bruce et al for organising dinner after the event. About 10 of us retired to a nearby Italian Wood Fired restaurant where Suzanne impressed us with her knowledge of Italian (no doubt gained from a previous flatmate who was silly enough to note that she had questionable taste in casual clothes and hasn't been heard of since) - and enthralled us with lewd suggestions about the name of the restaurant and the true meaning behind the picture on the front of the menu (one or two, too many Italian romantic novels there I suspect...).

Feedback from Participants

From Mark

Much as I would like 60 minutes, I believe that the only way to achieve this is to start at 7:00, so I am therefore saying that we have to stick with 8:00 finish. I say this for the reason you mention in your email – consistency with Wednesday. This should not be taken as precluding a special variation to suit a particular event as was done by Marta and David last year with their 8:15 finish (but again note that it was a specific time and not “75 minutes”).

In the “future” (generally and not just Mondays) I would love to see a system that allowed people to start at any time (within a reasonably narrow window, say 6:45 – 7:15) and run for 60 minutes. This would avoid the crowded mass starts and following that we see on some of the big Wednesday events. Perhaps the systems that we are experimenting with now will ultimately allow this. Street-O events that I took part in in Adelaide and Auckland over the Summer didn’t have mass starts. Adelaide was run in the familiar manner with “start” and “finish” timing tables but Auckland just used an honesty system where you wrote your start time on the card, waited next to the clock for the start and then wrote in your own finish time after completing the course.

From Louise

I would like to see 60 minutes - purely because that's the only way I'm going to get a 60-minute run. We have the technology; let's use it.  That would go for the walkers too. The only reason they get until 8:05 normally is because they don't get their maps until 7:05. Using the gizmo means we can make it a blanket 60 minutes for everyone - regardless of start time.
Louise

and I've caned you both (Mark & Geoff) anyway - even without late penalties.
(I'd like to do this map again - very well set course...)
 

If you haven't already done so, we need everybody to log into the training database and pick a date, a map and a course. If you haven't used it yet, why not check it out now at http://street.orienteering.com.au/training/login.asp

Userid/password available from Geoff (why don't you call, why don't you write...)

Note that in the last week - we've now included a contact list table - so we can capture contact details for participants - please note that this information is only visible to people that know how to login to this system.

The very latest thing in street-O torches
See YouTube Video for details