Planners Guide for Regional and National Events (Levels C and B)
It is hoped that these guidelines will be of some help to planners of AIRE Events.
They assume that the planner has access to an internet connected PC and preferably colour printer. Even if you don’t have a colour printer you will be able to plan on screen. Whoever supplies your map, either Chris Burden, Richard Foster or Tony Thornley, should be able to help you with printing if you cannot do it yourself.
The Map
Look at the Mapped Areas document on the Aire website to see who to get your maps from.
Useful Documents
Si Requirements Form V3- please complete and email to the SI Manager as soon as your courses are finalised.
Rules and Guidelines
All the downloads you could possibly need can be found at http://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/downloads/eventinfo.php
Familiarise yourself with the rules.
Rules 5, 6 & 8 are most relevant to planning
Most important to read are.
Appendix 1: Course Planning
Draft Event Guideline B For Regional and Local Cross Country Eventshttp://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/downloads/documents/EventGuidelineBLevel23CrossCountryEventsJanuary2009DRAFT.pdf:
Planning Principles
An excellent planning guide is Tony Thornley’s Art of Planning to be found amongst the Aire “Useful docs”. The Art of Planning
At http://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/downloads/eventinfo.php under “Planners Information” you can find a number of helpful guidelines. Particularly good are the Advice on Planning Junior courses by Barry Elkington.
The following are just a few personal favourite bullet points, and don’t claim to be a comprehensive guide.
- Plan your White, Yellow and Orange courses first (TD1, TD2, and TD3). Although the easiest to navigate, these have the most restrictions as to where they can go. They are most likely to determine where your start and finish can be.
- Avoid unnecessarily long walks to the start or from the finish, but balance this consideration against the opportunities the area offers to provide the best courses.
- Don’t use too many controls. Most Regional Events can be planned using between 35 and 50 controls. Dales events may need a few more. As may Middle Distance events on more confined areas.
- Try and get all your courses flowing in approximately the same direction.
- Avoid runners on one course leaving a control in the opposing direction of ideal approach on another course. It runs the increased risk of some runners being unfairly shown the correct line of approach to the control by those leaving it.
- For this reason avoid different courses having legs running in opposite directions.
- Avoid dog legs, where runners enter and leave a control the same way. A short leg to or from a nearby control can resolve this.
- Ask yourself the purpose of every control. Is it setting up a good leg or ending a good leg?
Technically Hard Courses
- If the area allows, try and have 2 long route choice legs which take up about 30% of the course distance. These will be hardest to plan well, so plan them first and build the rest of the course around them.
- Provide plenty of variation of leg length.
- Provide frequent change of direction.
- Try to vary the orienteering challenge throughout the course, so the competitor is constantly having to change the navigational techniques/style of running they deploy.
- With electronic punching crossovers are not a problem, but try not to use them excessively. If the course presentation becomes unclear then use back-to back maps for Part 1 and Part 2 of the course.
Controls
- You don’t make a course harder by using dodgy control sites, you make it unfair. Choose good clear sites which can be found by reasonable navigation. Brown features are usually best, green features worst.
- The flag or the feature should be visible from within about 10% of the distance from a sensible attack point – only less if there are other navigating features near the control.
- Take particular care hanging pit, depression and green/bracken controls – they should be on the edge of the relevant feature in most cases.
- With electronic punching, it is better to have a single last control with a shortish tape to the finish punch than “navigate to finish” as you cannot put a description for the finish on the CD list and it may be unfair.
The controller
- Agree with the controller well in advance what you will do and when (and stick to it).
- S/he will want to check your control sites. Tapes are not easy to find - it is best to put two colours of tape at each site, marked with the control number (for numbers see “Equipment” below). Dangly tape is better than PVC insulating tape. Plastic tent pegs work ok on moorland, but put tapes on them as well for visibility.
Event Organisation
For National Events Aire will usually provide the full range of Colour Coded Courses.
If the event is targeting non-orienteering runners to give the sport a try, think about providing a Long Orange course.
For our Medium Sized Regional Events, Aire usually provide White, Yellow, Orange, (Long Orange - see above), Light Green, Short Green, Green, Blue and Brown courses. We have a few areas which are too small to manage a Brown, but the use of back-to-back maps makes this an increasing rarity.
Give consideration to planning a Black course if the area size allows and only if you're likely to get a sufficent entry. You need 10 runers on a course to gain Ranking Points.
Make sure the controller and organiser know the courses you intend to plan very early. This is important for event publicity.
Aire always provide over-printed maps for all courses. Most commonly pictorial descriptions are used on all maps, except for TD1 - TD3 courses. Pictorial descriptions work for these classes, but most planners prefer to use text descitpions. A good practice, which is easily achievable using Purplepen (see below), is to have both text and pictorial, side by side for TD1- TD3 courses, which allows the competitors to get used to the norm of pictorial descriptions while having the back up of text.
It's probably best to just use pictorial loose CDs for TD1-3 courses, as having both pictorial and text is too bulky for most CD holders, although in parctice very few runnes on these courses take loos descriptions.
If the map does not have a legend or key, get the mapper to make some separately available for Enquiries. Get the Organiser to publicise this in pre-event information.
Planning Software
There are 3 programmes in use within Aire now.
Purple Pen
This is freeware and is downloadable at http://purplepen.golde.org/ Many clubs use no other system now. It has proved very intuitive for planners, and few first time users have needed help in getting to grips with it. When you receive your Ocad map simply save the file without trying to open it - you can't. When you create your Purplepen planning file the programme wil ask you to select you map. Choose the ocad file. It will open perfectly.
For Tony Thornley's Illustrator maps, Tony will send you a pdf of the map whichgcan be opened the same way.
OCAD
You can get an Ocad Course Setting programme for 30 Swiss Francs per year. In practice nobody has used this in years.
Condes
The club has a club wide licence for this planning programme. The access code is obtainable from Tony Thornley.
The Map
In the unlikely event that you have Ocad 12, please do not alter the map
You may notice inaccuracies on the map. You will very likely notice changes to the area that need to be shown on the map. Get in touch with the cartographer, usually either Tony Thornley, Richard Foster or Chris Burden, and give them details of what needs to be revised. They will advise on how to handle any changes. This way we can keep central record of the changes to areas and maps.
You will be able to replace the map template with a more updated version at any stage of the planning process (prior to exporting the course maps) without it causing any difficulties.
Planning overprint and other points - mainly relating to Purplepen
The purple overprint within Ocad is actually magenta and appears very red. It causes difficulties for the significant number of people who are colour blind.
All our maps are professionally printed. The colour settings for purple should be changed in Purplepen or Condes to: cyan 20%; magenta 100%; yellow 0%; black 0%.
Cut your control circles and lines between controls in the planning file. This is best done towards the end of the planning process, once the courses are agreed with your Controller.
Send the Purplepen file (or other planning file) to the mapper, who will arrange the printing. The norm is to have the planning file ready no later than 2 weeks before the event.
Text commands
If you wish to put in a text command in the descriptions anywhere e.g. “Cross Road with Care”, highlight the control before the command; Add>Text Line>insert text.
Courses planned in 2 parts are now very easy to set up. Add Map Flip/Exchange>choose option (most commonly Map Flip)>click on control. In the Course Part dropdown, you are now able to view and export either Part or the the entire course.
Equipment
AIRE has its own stock of stakes, kites, gripples and pin-punches, and approximately 80 SI blocks, The SI blocks are numbered from 151 upwards, but some numbers can be changed to allow for unused or duplicate control numbers. For multi-day events it is likely that extra equipment will have to be borrowed from neighbouring clubs using a different range of control numbers. Contact the SI manager for your event to determine what numbers will be available.
The SI manager will programme the control boxes and setup the AutoDownload event software with the control and course details. You will need to send them the course details in an XML file to do this (use the planning software to create an XML export file, e.g. Course>Export>Courses(XML) menu item and email the resulting file.) The mapper wil need to send the SI Manager a jpeg of the map for Routegadget.
All the equipment you need for setting out course controls can be supplied by the SI Manager for your event. In order for the SI Manager to know exactly what equipment you will need, complete the Si Requirements Form V3 and email it to the SI Manager along with the courses XML file.
Printer
We use Jack and Nigel Benham http://www.bmlprint.co.uk/ to print waterproof maps for these events. Other neighbouring clubs sometimes use Hassall and Lucking www.lucking.co.uk, but Aire have not done so to date
Discuss with your mapper who is going to arrange printing, and, if not you, ensure that whoever is arranging the printing has an address for the maps to be sent to.
Chris Burden chris.burdenATbtinternet.com keeps a record of attendances at Regional and Large Local Events and can advise how many maps to order.
Check the maps when you get them back. If there are any mistakes get straight back in touch with the printer. These are rare. BML are usually able to resolve any problem with very little notice (an absolute minimumnof 2 days)
On the Day
It will be best to prepare a map or maps showing the order in which you will put out the controls. A copy of this will also be very helpful for the controller. You can do this on the Course Planning file.
Stakes are very lightweight. It's worth practicing how many you can realistically carry at any one time. SI Boxes can be threaded onto string or tape to keep them in the right order and carried in a rucksack, or large bag, along with the kites and any gripples required. Depending on distance and experience, allow around 5 minutes per control to put out plus travel between control sites. It always takes longer than you think!
On the day your responsibility is for everything from the start kite to, and including, the final control(s). Everything else is the responsibility of the organiser.
Be prepared with spare stakes, kites, SI boxes etc.. You will have some back-up SI boxes if any fail or go missing. These will have a blank label on the top with the internally-programmed number on a smaller label on the back. When replacing a failed or missing SI block, write the control number (with a permanent marker) on top of the spare SI block and make a note of the number on the back. You MUST let the SI Manager know these numbers a.s.a.p. when you return to Assembly so that they can add the number of the spare SI block into the event software - failing to do this will results in competitors mispunching.
The most vulnerable time for vandalism, is near the end of the competition when there are few runners left. Give forethought as to when you should start collecting certain controls in, and discuss it with the controller. Try and arrange help for this task in advance (the organiser should help to identify volunteers)
You can prepare maps for anyone who is bringing in controls during or after the event, or for anyone who is needed to patrol.
Bring a mobile phone and make sure you have exchanged numbers with the controller and organiser.
During the event you should be able to go out into the area and view how the competitors are managing your courses, or hang around the finish or assembly, whichever you prefer. Barring accidents, until it is time to bring in the controls, your job is done.
Finally
Tony Thornley, Richard Foster or Chris Burden are more than happy to offer learner planners advice or help if needed.
Chris Burden June 2024
Other Events Resources pages
- Important Event Information
- Organisers Guidelines
- Airienteers Helper Vouchers
- Local Events - Organiser Guidelines
- Regional Events - Organiser Guidelines
- Safety Checklist for Informal Events
- Vampire-O Events
- Planners Guide for Regional and National Events (Levels C and B)
- SI Equipment
- Useful Documents