Central Leeds

Thanks to the Midnight Bell for use of their outdoor area

Edit to Planners comments: We now have an organiser for Danefield. Thanks Andy. Still a vacancy for Bramley Park sprint on 1st June. (Fixtures Sec)

Planners Comments

Thanks to everyone who came to the event. I hope you enjoyed something a little different to finish the series off. The desire not to have to put any kites out led to me wanting to use street furniture, but I didn’t want to do postboxes or lampposts like at other events. A quick check of various websites gave me the locations of most blue plaques in the city centre (interestingly no one site seems to have them all and the Leeds Civic Trust one appears on none) and I started planning around them. All of them were checked in the storms of last week (yes, I got very wet doing so). I had also finally finished the map extension to the East of Vicar Lane, the redeveloped Whitehall plaza area and Holbeck Urban village (to the south of water lane- which was done to join the map up with the Holbeck Moor area we used for a sprint last summer), so I also wanted to use these bits too. Apologies for not having time to add all the areas of roadworks, nor the new bike lanes that have appeared in places – I don’t think they affected navigation/routes too much. No-one also seemed to notice the contours at the top of the map shifted from being 5m to 2.5m too! I was originally going to have far less controls, but I changed my mind when seeing how many blue plaques there were, and so decided instead to throw as many as I could (although not all – there were some that weren’t on the map) at you to create a real challenge as to the best route and to make it an intense experience with lots of fast decisions to make. This all meant a back-to-back map to make it all fit and a few extra controls that weren’t blue plaques. But it did mean that it was more challenging to get them all in the hour. Well done to Nathan and Alice for doing so. Answers on the control cards didn’t quite work, but it was the best I could come up with at short notice! I’ll think of a better solution for next year. I’ve put my own route up (bearing in mind I’ve had far more time to think about it!) for getting all the controls – it comes to 11.3km, so doable in the hour for the faster runners. Mine is a brave route – pick off all the outer controls first, before working back into the middle, so you’d have to be confident you can run fast enough to get the pay off! I’d be interested to see what routes people did take, so please add your routes to Routegadget if you can. Finally thanks to the Midnight Bell for the use of their outdoor space. I was pleased of being under cover when it started to rain later on! Next AIRE event is the Spring Sprint series, starting with Danefield on 27th April. We still need a planner/organiser for the event, so if you fancy giving it a go, we’d be welcome to offers. Help and assistance is available for inexperienced/new planners. Thanks, Richard PS: For those of you still getting their head round the penalties, it was an arithmetic sequence to make being late progressively more severe, so: 10pts for the first min/part min, plus 20pts for the second minute, 30 for the third etc. So if you were 5mins late, that would be 10+20+30+40+50 = 150 penalty points. I did this because it was quite easy to pick up more than 10points per min of controls in a few areas, potentially rewarding people who were overtime, so the penalties needed to be harsh! Not something to be used at all score events!

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