Thanks to everyone who came to the Scottish Score Championships at Vogrie Country Park today. What a fabulous turnout - almost 250 competitors took up the challenge, including 150 on course 2 (60 minutes Score) alone, and 41 on the Yellow (line course) - great to see lots of juniors and quite a few newcomers.

Results are now available:

• Simple Results
• Medal Winners
• Routegadget (Score Courses)

Thanks also to all our volunteers, some of whom were on site from 9am waking up controls right until all the kit was finally collected in and packed up as night fell. Special thanks to our planner (Mike Stewart), organiser (Ray Ward), controller (Roger Scrutton) and event co-ordinator / IT organiser (William Ivory with help from Robin Strain). Additional thanks to ELO for allowing us to use their area, and to Trina Rogerson in particular for dealing with multiple landowners to arrange permissions.

(Registration Queue and M/W55 Winners)

Planner's notes (Mike Stewart)

Planning was done in September during a week of unbroken blue skies. The extended area to the south covers private land and river denes make the area suitable for hosting the Scottish Score Championships. There was enough available to create courses that only the very elite runners could get all the points.

The weather gods ensured a dry lead up to the Event ensuring the denes in particular were in great condition and I hope you all enjoyed your outing.

(Vogrie House in the sun - Mike Stewart)

Thanks to the various landowners for permissions. Ewart Scott came all the way down from Inverness to help me put out controls. Roger Scrutton did a power of good work.  Ray Ward was organising his first decent sized event and did a great job. Thanks to those that woke the event up and the post event collectors.

Me? I write this with an inspiring BBC recordings classics belting out and a glass of bordeaux in hand. Cheers all.

Controller's report (Roger Scrutton, ESOC)

The preparation was very thorough and, in particular, Ray successfully navigated his way through a lot of material new to him as a first-time Organiser.  The day was set fair, but then became very eventful:

Only the day before we discovered that an open ploughed field in the north of the area, potentially a route on a couple of the courses, had been planted up with a winter crop.  On balance we thought that we couldn't ask runners to go across this, so steps had to be taken at the Start to point out to competitors that the field was now OOB.  Everything worked out okay.
Then midway through the event we had an injured runner, who had slipped on a steep slope and either seriously sprained or broken his ankle.  He was helped back to Assembly and then taken to hospital by a friend for an X-ray and treatment.  We hope that he is already on the road to recovery, although it will probably take several weeks.

As runners started to come into the Finish it was clear that a thin strip of woodland and adjacent track between OOB fields (horse paddocks) was being various interpreted as wholly OOB or just the track OOB (the track was overprinted with one or two crosses, as were all the tracks in that area as forbidden routes, but the woodland had no overprint).  We acknowledge that this was to some extent ambiguous and apologise to runners who were left uncertain by this.

There was an excellent turn out of volunteers from Interlopers and not least, to run the prizegiving at the end (thanks Peter Hodkinson for doing the honours!).  I daresay there were hiccups here and there but everything ran smoothly.

Vogrie is an interesting area - it has a veritable random network of paths and features  around the central area and then tough, deep, vegetated valleys and rugged quarries in other parts.  Often control sites look easy, but then take more time than expected to reach.  Quite a lot of runners went over time.

Organiser's Report (Ray Ward)

As a first moderately sized event to organise, this was a good one and provided lots of learning points.  From the rapidly increasing entry numbers in the final hours leaving me 162 runners on the same course to fit into a 2 hour start window, an injured competitor giving me an immediate chance to appreciate the value of the Event Safety Workshop, a farmer reclaiming his field and uncertainties around the out-of-bounds, there was always something to be thinking about.  But throughout this I was extremely fortunate to be surrounded by an experienced and skilled event team who guided me on what to do.  

There was great support from local clubs: Roger Scrutton from ESOC was there throughout, even running the safety workshop which was a prerequisite for me to be the organiser, and producing the incident form (and blanket) from his car boot when needed; Michael Atkinson from ELO who liaised with the council and proved himself to be a real expert on toilets; and of course, the ever-present Strains who are such a crucial part of any smooth running IT setup.  But Interlopers really provided their A-team, with interesting and challenging courses planned by Mike, IT and overall event co-ordination from William and club members out from early morning to night making my job easy.

All of this helped ensure that the day passed without too many unsolvable disasters - which I'm taking as a success.  We were lucky of course with the weather - while not exactly sunny, it fairly excelled itself for Midlothian in November.  And I was pleasantly surprised that toilet armageddon didn't materialise (one of my bigger stresses with ballooning entry numbers) - just give me a call if you find yourselves short of some toilet paper over the next few months!  My sincerest thanks to everyone who made this happen.

Event co-ordinator's thoughts (William Ivory)

Putting on a championship event can't be that much harder than a local event, can it? This was actually my first championship as Interlopers event co-ordinator, and a Score champs to boot. While some things just scaled up, there were additional considerations that just aren't relevant for smaller events (or even SOLs). Trophies are at stake, so everything needs to be carefully checked. Prize-giving is an extra excitement, co-ordinating people / medals / trophies / banners, figuring out how to efficiently produce results before it's too dark to read them et ... and ensure ESOC got their results in time for their club championship event in the evening, just to add to the pressure. A jury needs to be arranged, just in case of any problems with the courses on the day.

Entries are more complex - ensuring each age class maps to the correct course, allowing hire not just of standard dibbers but air dibbers (ok, so maybe that happens at other events too but was a first for me), remembering to ask for trophy eligibility (and presenting the requirements in a concise but readable format) ... and don't forget start times then need to be allocated. With the very limited number of courses, and the current allocation of age classes to those courses, we had around 30 each on courses 1 (70-minute, elite) and 3 (40-minute, juniors), then a whopping 162 advance entries for course 2. After various potential schemes were discussed, Ray had the clever idea of just starting one person every 30 seconds, regardless of course. Given it's a Score, people would likely not be departing the start rapidly and even with 1-minute intervals, you would likely still have people hanging around. To be honest, you could probably have a mini-mass start every 10 minutes without impacting on the results at all!

Lastly the IT also needs scaling up - definitely a multiple laptop event - and with the clock change having occurred since the last time the units were used, every SI unit being used, or that might get used, needs to have its clock synced (70 units took 15 minutes to sync, since you asked). While a Score event has fewer courses, the nature of a Score event means that there are lots of subtle differences when setting up the SI Timing software (setting penalty points), and producing results (both the basic results and Routegadget need quite a few setting changed from the normal ones).

(70 synced SI units - William Ivory)

Forthcoming Events