Discussion: Event Feedback

Thanks to all the atheletes who came to the Ski-O championships this year. With 93 starts for the middle, it was the largest championship turnout in recent years.

I would like to hear everyones feedback about at least the elements I was responsible for. You can either post them here, or email them to me at edwarddes@gmail.com I am most interested in comments on the courses, map, stadium, results, displays, timing system, venue, and printing, although comments about any aspect of the event are appreciated. Your feedback is helpful to plan and improve future events.

There are a few areas where I am aware of deficiencies in the planning and execution:

Pre race information. We didn't get out enough information on course lengths, skiable lengths and climb before the starts.

Long start and map exchange. The map handout was too slow in the cold, and the seeding wasn't clear enough for enforced well enough. I gave confusing instructions for the lap/map exchange, and showing the exchange control on both maps was a mistake especially given the direction we ended up directing people. We needed more signs at the entrance of the stadium for lap entrance, lap exit, and finish.

Course setting. The long courses were a bit short (maybe appreciated on a cold day), and there were too many doglegs on some of the courses. I have a hard time setting longs, so suggestions of ways to improve these courses would help.

i only attended sat& sun, but definitely was very well organized. thanks a lot.. the 9h drive (each way) was ok, thanks to a well organized event. i found that many places when choosing a route choice,routes were quite well planned - that did not give you 'only one option'. thanks again

Excellent, fun event, very well done especially considering all the work necessitated on the course at the last minute because of Wednesday's snow storm. My comments for things that might be done differently:

1. While those of us choosing to ski classical style are knowingly at a speed disadvantage in a freestyle event, the disadvantage was increased in the long by the almost complete lack of tracks on the very wide trails in the butterfly portion. Perhaps it was the crew at Stowe assuming that it would be like a normal nordic event where freestyle means everyone skates, whereas for a reasonable portion of those in the older age groups doing the ski-O, freestyle meant classic.

2. Although it worked out well this time in terms of having great weather on Friday afternoon and terrible weather on Saturday afternoon, my personal preference would be to have both the sprint and middle distance on Saturday. To me spending a Saturday just to ski a middle course 2 seemed kind of minimal, although the middle turned out to be more of an adventure than I'd anticipated by breaking a ski on the course. If the sprint and middle had been on the same day, I expect I would have decided to compete in my age group rather than moving up to get longer courses. It also would have increased the number of competitors in the sprint who were unable to make in on Friday. In that respect I note the difference between track and nordic events where competitors in a nordic sprint event do up to four races in one session so perhaps the three events could be held over 2 days for a ski O champs even though held over 3 days for a foot O champs.

3. I understand it was much more of a problem for others (I didn't use any corrective lenses, which gives me perfect eyesight up close, but with some vision loss for distance), but I had heard something about a 1:12500 minimum scale rule for long ski O. I couldn't find that rule (made more difficult by half the pages of the rules being upside down on my computer), but I did find the following with respect to Masters Ski O:

"WMSOC 15.7 The map for age classes 45 and above shall be at a scale of 1:10000, and this scale may be used for all classes with the approval of the IOF Event Adviser."

4. The minor glitch for everyone at the start of the sprint could have been avoided by mentioning in the meet notes that we had to follow a fence to the start triangle. I was standing right behind Sharon Crawford when she asked the start official whether or not we were standing at the start triangle and was told yes.

We just held Barebones in Canmore, which was also a ski orienteering event and I can offer some Barebones self-feedback (i.e. from the organizer (me) not the competitors)

• Sprint on one day, Middle on the next - I agree with rlinzdon that this is might be a bit too spaced out. The sprint in particular seemed a bit 'lonely' and 'what am I going to do for the rest of the day". But it sure is more relaxing for the organizers


• Calculating skiable distance. I just found out (after the race ;-( that the latest CONDES has a cool feature where you can draw the "shortest sensible route" for each leg, and then the software will give you the total course length. Very cool.


• At Barebones, even for the Long distance, I think most people preferred the smaller map (1:15,000) so it would fit in the map holders and not require folding/unfolding

@rlindzon

I found the following in the IOF Ski O Mapping standard. Not sure if it is what you were thinking of.

3 Scale

The official map scales in official IOF ski orienteering events are:
1:15000 in long distance events
1:10000 in middle distance and relay events; and
1:5000 in sprint and sprint relay events;

In addition to the official map scales, two supporting map scales are available:
1:12500 in long distance events; and
1:7500 in middle distance and relay events.

These supporting scales can be used only by the permission of the IOF event adviser if one or more of the following conditions are met: ....

Map scales in ski-o are also complicated by the map symbols changing size at a different rate than the track symbols. Its not just a matter of enlarging/reducing the map to change the scale, but requires review and edits to make sure edges still line up, and junctions still make sense.

We did consider doing the M/F21 at 1:12500, and everyone else at 1:10000, but we just didn't have the time to get two different versions of the map prepped for the day.

Thanks, @AZ. That's the one. I missed that in my googling. @AZ: In this case my middle distance course 4 map at 1:10000 and long distance course 2 map at 1:12500 covered approximately the same territory, actually just a bit less on the long map.
Thanks for the response, @edwarddes.

Ed, excellent event at an excellent venue! Lots of thanks to everybody involved.

The immediate trail system was a find. Perfect for S and M with today’s style of Ski-O. Are there any more centers like that? The area was less suitable for Long being on a hillside, with, I imagine, less possibilities for additional tracks.

Suggestions for the Mass Start: Provide folded maps, held closed by paper labels. Have them in well visible selfserve spaced-out boxes. Maps may be only opened at a command - or shamed and DSQ'd. Possibly, have racer numbers in blocks per courses if the map pickups need to be monitored.

The results automation was again outstanding. First time I ever have encountered a start gate.

I liked that there was a start gate and photo finish timing, because it felt like a ski race.

I really liked the course setting/venue for sprint and middle. The long distance was tougher to set a good navigational challenge, and there was more climb than I consider fun, but that may just be the nature of that venue. I found myself doing a few doglegs during the long, which is less fun than encountering new terrain. I would have liked more small trails; I felt like you guys could have maybe used the small trails a bit more - it was sort of like ski a while on big trails, then get a single control in a little maze, then ski more on a big trail. Could have had a few controls in the maze. That said, it was pretty awesome to see snowmobile narrow trails at a US venue!

I also liked that you guys went and got some sponsors. Eventually, maybe, hopefully, merchandise sponsors will be a regular thing at orienteering events!

The venue was fantastic; having the yurt with the registration/timing/fire kind of made my day.

One other thought - you can have longer with the maps (according to IOF rules) before the start of the long, right? I feel like I've been at races where we've been allowed 30s or more before a mass start. This is nice because it means everyone has probably gotten the map in and taken a look, so everyone will leave when you say go. Not a huge problem for those of us on the front row, but I imagine if you were on a further-back row, and the person in front of you hadn't figured out where to go yet, that would be a frustrating wait.

Overall, great meet. Thank you.

Overall, the meet was well done and great fun! Of course most of the following comments are about things which I would have liked done slightly differently, but please don't take them as a sign of dissatisfaction with the event, just some things that would be nice to take into consideration for future ski-O's. For me it was a really worthwhile weekend in pretty much every way.

In contrast to some of the other comments, I didn't much mind having the sprints on the Friday afternoon, in consideration of the driving distance to the meet. I was pretty much going to have to take most of Friday off from work anyway, and it just meant leaving home earlier (my ride picked me up at 5:30am) than I might have done if there wasn't a race in the afternoon. Might have been a different attitude if I had lived either very close to the meet site, or was traveling in by plane.

About the map scales--I would have been a lot happier if they had all been 1:10,000 or larger for us older folks. On Friday with the 1:5,000, I could read the map while skiing, it put lots of pressure on to keep pushing pretty hard throughout, and it was tremendous fun. And this is coming from someone that generally doesn't like the sprint format in any version of any sport! On Saturday in the middle with 1:10,000 map it was still sufficiently legible to me that on the peripheral bits with lower trail density I could keep track of things while still moving, but in the central bit with higher trail density, I was generally having to come to a complete standstill and stare at the map intently to determine what was going on with the trails. On Sunday with the 1:12,500, the central area felt like it had just been scribbled over with dense green crayon, to the extent that I had great difficulty in making out the purple course overprinting on top of the green. Because of the slightly peculiar difference in the way that ski-O trails change (or don't) with map scale compared to foot orienteering maps, one difficulty is that in several places the white actually got squeezed completely out between green trails, giving the impression that trails were merging together rather than merely going nearly parallel to one another, and in a couple of other places they were so close together that purple connecting lines gave me the false impression (just continuation of the dark between two nearby bends of green trail) that trails connected where they didn't. The difficulty with the overwhelming density of green was sufficiently great that I was still standing by the start line trying to find my number 1 control (the purple 1 happened to mostly overlap a green trail on my particular course, and I just wasn't able to pick it out for almost a minute) by the time that most of the rest of the skiers had already vanished out of sight off the start field by the time I knew where I was heading. This problem may have been somewhat accentuated by the fact that many of the course 1 skiers were still hearing people looking for bib 5 to give them his or her map at the time we were apparently being told we could turn over our maps, so there was an extra 15 or 20 seconds that had elapsed after the people ahead of us suddenly started moving while I was still trying to get my map into the mapholder with the thicker gloves that went with the cold day). But on the map scales, to my reading of the IOF regulations, I think that the segment quoted below is relevant:

"When the ski orienteering events are organised at cross-country skiing and
biathlon stadiums or centres, (where the complex track system is packed in
very narrow and tight areas with bridges, tunnels, walls, fences, earth walls,
etc), it might not be possible to depict the complex track system legibly with
the official map scales, and therefore, to maintain the legibility of the maps,
supporting map scales are needed. This condition may apply even when
major part of the terrain and track system is not dense, if some areas,
located in the centre of the event, can not be depicted legibly and justly in
the official map scales.

In ski orienteering, the map reading takes place at very high speed (especially in
downhill sections) and often in weather conditions (frost and snow fall) that limit the readability of the map. That in combination with the above conditions, contain a risk that the competition will be won not on the merits of the sport, but on the legibility of the map. This is true, not only for the more experienced elite classes, but especially for the veteran and junior classes. Therefore, the IOF event adviser must, whilst keeping the strong preference on staying within the official map scales, decide on the use of map scales on the basis of legibility and fairness."

I understand that it would have been more difficult to at the last minute print up maps for the last day at two different scales for different classes, but maybe not so very difficult, since if the day 3 courses had been printed on the day 2 map for courses 1 and 2, the map had already been made and line widths picked appropriately. It would have left only the M40 class, who are really just beginning to get into the wonderful world of presbyopia, competing on the smaller scale maps in addition to the M21 and F21 classes. Looking at the overlap of the trails in a couple of places on the 1:12,500 version of the map, even for those advanced classes it might have still been nicer to have slightly distorted one or both of the colliding trails a little bit on the version used for the smaller scale map to avoid the extra "trail intersections".

I was quite wondering why the M65 competitors got moved from course 2 to course 1 on the last day? It made the course lengths almost the same for the middle and long distance, and it made the splits comparisons generally less interesting for people with some of our friends in different age classes but somewhat similar skiing speed. An additional difficulty with putting us on a different course from what we had done the previous days was that maybe the butterfly loop was a little less neutral than it might have otherwise been. One half of the butterfly for M65 was almost identical to a loop that we had been sent around the previous day, and was on a less complex part of the trail system, while the other half of the butterfly was right in the midst of the densest mass of trails on the map. So half of the age group went out through a complex first leg, and had to make immediately decisions on two of the three (or maybe four, counting the first leg) toughest legs on the course, while the others had a loop they had already worked out the day before to spend some extra thought on those two rather tough controls coming up next. While I think the complexity of the two halves of the butterfly were quite different on course 1--haven't had a chance to look at course 2 yet--it is a lot less likely that having previously essentially used one side the day before would have happened if people had been just left on the same course throughout the weekend (if they always raced in their age group). At least I'm assuming that the course designers were looking at what people on the same course had been doing on the previous two days when they were deciding where to put legs for the final race. Fortunately(?), the gap between me and the first few racers in M65 was so large that any quibbles about map readability or fairness of butterflies were pretty irrelevant, and it did end up with a really fun dash for the finish trying to catch Hans Bengtsen after I made a hash of our 11th control, and even though I wasn't quite able to catch him, the last leg into the finish was 15 seconds faster that I had managed on either of the previous two days!

Again from a standpoint of fairness and legibility, I would think that control numbers/codes on each of the controls on a butterfly loop for the same course should be positioned as nearly as possible identically on both versions of the map. Course 1A and 1B had two different confusing situations. As I had mentioned on 1B, the 1 on my first control was essentially camouflaged by the trail system. On map 1A, the 1 was nicely out on white and clearly visible--but it was placed rather closer to control 3 than was the control number and control code for control 3. Jeff Saeger headed right for it and punched, then headed off for number 2, punched there, and then looked for control 3, and then realized that he had already been there and he now had to find control 1 and start over again. A combination of positioning the description for control 1/4/7 as done on 1A and that for 3 (6) roughly as done on map 1B would have avoided both the legibility and ambiguity problems. It is obviously not always going to be possible to catch all the issues like that which come up, but at least it would be good to have the same defect for people on both variants of the butterfly.

But enough of the whining! It was a great weekend, a really fun venue, and very much worth the travel. And all the technological wizardry helped make it more enjoyable, too.

I realize that you are asking for comments, but I still feel as if I am wining, but since you asked.
You needed to mark the start obviously on the ground, I am pretty sure the control for the start was in the wrong spot on the middle.
Any mapped area must be completely mapped. Trails must continue to the edge of the mapped area or they will be perceived as being stubs or dead ends. This resulted in many going off map on the middle with the trail stub shown at control 68, which was actually a major trail going off the map.
Map readability was a problem with the 1:12500 maps, the short connectors were indistinguishable from the groomed trails and several non connecting trails appeared to connect.
And yeah, I think you have to be careful about where you put the numbers for controls. There were several reasons I should have realized 74 wasn't my first control, but the numbers should be placed carefully.
It was a wonderful meet overall, and I really appreciate all the work you have been doing putting these on.

As has been discussed above, the 1:12500 scale for the Long was to comply with IOF mapping specifications for Ski-O. We recognized it made the map harder to read, but as IOF Event Advisor, it was my call to require that scale to be used. A larger scale of 1:10000 is not allowed for Long, even though it would have worked for this venue. A scale of 1:15000 is actually preferred in the specifications. In my report to the IOF, I will convey this issue, and the apparent contradiction with the specifications for World Masters maps.