There were 52 riders for Saturday’s event – which was a great post-lockdown turnout, despite Friday’s weather adding to the challenge! A big thanks to David Day for the course planning (and re-planning) and event organisation. It was also our pilot event for MapRun, so plenty to report on.
Markington was NYMBO’s & BMBO’s first MapRun event as a trial where we did not use treasure hunt clues or SI boxes. Local orienteering club Claro have successfully put on several foot O MapRuns, both urban & in the wilds of Nidderdale, using Open Orienteering Map [OOM] & OS maps.
About half of Markington’s competitors had problems getting their phones to get a GPX fix on MapRun; Smartwatches seemed to fare OK, although both use GPS ie satellites mobile phone signal is poor in the village. It is not clear yet what the problems were so it would help planning for future events if you can tell us your experience yesterday – what devices did you use, what network you are on, was it successful, how easy did you find it to load your track onto the MapRun website; email David Day with your thoughts. If you want your route uploading please also e-mail Tim or David (deedays@tiscali.co.uk)
MapRun cannot accommodate BMBO’s standard penalty system so I have recalculated MapRun scores where penalties applied & the results spreadsheet reflects this. When loading your course onto MapRun it is possible to add controls which did not register on the phone & subtract those which it counted twice – this happens if a control is passed more than once. There are some entries on MapRun which do not have a score or a time – try to put this right if it applies to you.
During the event it became apparent that we should have had a pre-start where competitors could fire up their phones & then move to the start proper some distance away where timing would start when the phone recognised the start. The finish had to be at a location which could not be passed accidentally en route to controls as if the phone recognises the finish this ends the competitor’s track, hence the finish behind the pub well away from the road or nearby BW.
The Markington event was originally planned in December, then January, then lockdown 3 happened. The winter version avoided the muddiest BWs but as the event changed to summer there was an element of re-planning to utilise what should have been more rideable tracks. Then ….. it rained most of the week & ruined my plans. Even the Roecliffe to Bishop Monkton road was flooded axle deep but passable fortunately. Now for the results: There was a tie for the winner on 342 points – Ian Nixon & Andy Conn; 3rd on 293 was young local rider Ben Collins whose Strava track boasts how good is was to not be held back by his Dad!, 4th on 290 was local rider Tim Evans no doubt using his experience of the area. First lady was the evergreen Andrea Foster on 277, Sue Booth came next with 260; Please check your scores & times & advise me if they are wrong; ‘no track’ means there was no track of the ride submitted to the MapRun website, ‘manual MapRun’ means that no track was submitted but controls visited were entered manually. You can look at others’ routes by clicking on their track & entering the PIN on the back of your map. One rider failed to report to the finish which did cause some concern to the organising team about the well being of that rider, thankfully located safely at home later.