Planning Observations

Since I've been back from my summer break I've been to 19 events ranging from Level D and MLS to British Champs. On the whole I've been very impressed with the planning apart from three events, one an MLS event by a very inexperienced team and two Galloppens.

Have a look at the Short Green course at Haytor:

Click map segment to view full Short Green course on Routegadget

This looks like an orange course to me except that most of the controls were 'underground' and not visible even when very close to the control.

Colin Dickson (BAOC), one of the most experienced planners and coaches in England, describes orienteering as a journey through a series of points, defined by controls.

The biggest mistakes inexperienced planners make is to have too many controls and to have 'bingo' controls (often controls in depressions hidden among vegetation).

A Middle Distance event, such as the British Championships at Wendover is expected to be a control-picking exercise with only micro route choice and lots of controls, but Classic orienteering should have far fewer controls and give challenging route choice problems with choice between long safe routes and shorter riskier routes. Too many controls takes away the route choice. There is no reason why the Short Green Course at Haytor should have had more than about 8 controls (possibly even less) and it could have given the same challenges as a longer course. In fact the second half of the Blue Course (which I didn't do as I retired injured) would have been suitable for the Short Green Course?

My biggest bugbear is bingo controls: The first half of the Blue Course (which I did complete) was a succession of short legs to controls in small pits hidden in gorse and bracken. The controls were placed at the bottom of the pits and you could be 5m away from a control and see neither the feature nor the control flag. Since I use a lot of accurate compass and pacing I am able to 'navigate' accurately into the vicinity of this type of control but still often then needed to search for the control. The controls would have been easy to find if you saw another competitor leaving the control and leads to grouping of competitors and the mass search.

Click map segment to view full Blue course on Routegadget

My view of planning is that someone of my ability should be able to walk round a course and navigate through controls without any hesitations or searching for controls. I wouldn't have been able to do that at Haytor or Foxbury.

Brian Johnson