Discussion: Best Fork & Skipped Control

Could someone smarter than me tell me which was the best control to skip and which of the two available forked controls was faster?

I skipped the last control and took the left hand fork but upon reflection in my armchair I suspect 9 would have been the better control to drop and I should have gone with the right on the fork. Basically I should have followed JJ when I saw him heading up the road.

Kristin skipped 26, and Angelica, Jeff and I skipped 9 (we were all at 8 together). Just looking at our splits, it looks like it was pretty even as to which was the better choice.

Check out the skip analysis link (from the splits page on AP).

Ok, that is really cool.

Skipping 9 may be even better then indicated by the skip analysis, because some people did it by going straight, which I suspect was slower than going immediately to the road. But the four best skips were all within 45 seconds of each other, so any of them was a fine choice.

But Glen points out that interaction with the fork may make skipping 9 look better than it really was (maybe followed by what look like a time loss on #11?).

How about the better fork control. It may be hard to comment on that given how many folks skipped 9. All things being equal is there a view on whether left or right was the better choice?

I'm hoping the results will get annotated to indicate which fork people chose so that we can analyze that.

I can only speak for myself. I chose 10A right becuase I thought I could run a straighter distance from 9-10A then from 9 to 10B. I also like the 10A-11 route better than than the 10B-11 route as it avoided more green.

A timely topic…enter your routes on RouteGadget.

http://www.vmeyer.net/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi

I am not sure, but may have to adjust your route if you did 10B.

Excellent! Thanks, Valerie!

GPS tracks may not line up properly in the beginning if you didn't wait til the start triangle to begin watch recording, because we actually started running at the edge of the parking area, not at the start triangle marked on the map.

How do I reupload to fix this? I tried and it doesn't seem to have replaced the old track

Nice course. Regret my Billygoat days are behind me. But good job course setter getting them running their legs to jelly before those heavily technical legs 17-23.
But why all the doglegs?
My armchair orienteer choice of a control to skip... #9 with choice of 10 A to follow. Did anyone do that?

Danny - I will have to delete so you can redo. Will be at a computer in a little bit.

Skip 9 followed by 10A was surely the most popular choice, taken by (I'm assuming) 24 people. The doglegs serve two purposes. One was to make it so that certain controls weren't so tempting as skips (by putting the controls in pairs -- though this isn't really necessary), and the other is that having doglegs like this in a mass start race gives runners a chance to see who is just ahead or just behind, as the paths cross. There was more of this in this particular course design than you typically see.

Danny - you can redo your route, after refreshing the screen.

Your case is interesting, Jeremy: your skip gained you a bunch of time, but no places, as there wasn't anybody close enough ahead of you for you to overtake. (Close, but not quite.) You left coach, cmpbllv, and cmorse in the dust (you probably could have outsprinted all of them anyway), but didn't quite catch Nate.

Skipping the last control is always a great way to finish a Billygoat. ;-)

Congrats to Rhombus for bringing the goat back to Canada.

The results do have the fork and skip choices listed now, although there are 18 people for whom the fork isn't listed. Among those for whom it is, Right was the overwhelming favorite, with only seven people listed as having gone Left (including the top four).

I went right though, so that column is not accurate.

Comparing myself with contemporaries, Jeremy and Kristen, I gained about 5 minutes at the 9 skip (and note I had a pretty fast split there), and lost 4 1/2 minutes to them going to 26. Fortunately for my placing, neither my error of 4 minutes at 19, nor the time spent going to 26, cost me any places....and I have retired from contesting placing in the BG, just want to keep finishing.

@barrett, I have updated your fork to R
I had to infer some from reading peoples logs and gps routes that I could see at the time. The boxes I checked for the fork don't have the records for the SI air punches and they are the same code to simplify programing for skip course variation. If any of the ? have their fork I can record on the results.

I'll note that complication in the guide for future organizers.

You could request SI-Air users to physically punch at the forked control - no penalty if they don't, but makes post race results processing easier on the organizer if they do.

That was one of the thoughts I had, seems like a good solution.

Turn off beacon mode for the forked control, that'd force them to punch (or mispunch).

Certainly, but that's more annoying for the competitors.

Just like our MTBO event on the weekend where we went back to the 'bad old days' of 30cm beacon rather than the 1.5m we've gotten used to over the past year and a half (the 1.5m units were being reserved for this coming weekend - unfortunately many of the units last weekend were off tracks tied to trees so you had to drag your bike into the bush to get near enough anyway).

Knowing that I didn't have to go to 26 helped me mentally during the last quarter of the course! I do think 9 was probably a better skip in terms of saving time ... but 9 was kind of a fun control to go to (and 26 didn't look very exciting). So, I may have been a little slower, but it was worth it.

I figured 9 was probably a bit better to skip but Joe who was just ahead of me went to 9 and I didn’t want to lose the pack. Greg, Danny, and Eric just behind me probably had a similar idea.

My path - skip 9, 10A, and continue a road run almost all the way to 11. [viewable on RG]

Rationale - in the middle of a race where I questioned my own conditioning, I was able to swap in 25 minutes of trivial navigation, completely open and smooth traveling - in addition to avoiding what looked like a grueling trip along the side of the hill to 9 (and the climb out of that hill).

Skipping early also allowed me to catch up with better navigators who were now more worn out - and I could now keep up with until the end.

I then tacked on a trivial control before the finish and it did not change my place. But not being in the mix I was with would have delayed me doubly.

Also - navigated 12-13 with a mantra "follow the telephone poles to water, take the easy path around"...