Joseph D. Grant County Park
Date: (Sun.) Mar. 14, 2010
Location: San Jose, CA
Event Director: 
- 408.878.5073
Course Setters: Jim Fish, Kelly Wells
Type: B; This will be the second day of an exciting weekend of orienteering in conjunction with the Western Region Interscholastic Championships. The first day will be Saturday at McLaren Park.
Observations of the Advanced Courses Course Setter
By
As competitors, we often compare route choices and split times. When setting courses, I tend to compare courses from other events and try to emulate the conditions I like, while avoiding the things I don't like.
After looking at the results, and comparing times with a few competitors' USOF rankings, it appears to me that the Blue, Red, and Green courses were a bit too short lengthwise, and Brown was just about right. Being a 50-point runner, and not always taking the hardest, straightest line between controls, it is a challenge for me to judge the winning times. In past events, I was fortunate enough to have pre-runners test run a couple of courses and make good suggestions.
The biggest complaint after the run was the amount of poison oak on the course, and I have to admit that this surprised me. After years of exposure, I am pretty sensitive to poison oak and will start to feel the rash within a couple of hours of touching the plant. Having visited Joe Grant 8 times before Sunday, I only caught a little patch on one finger back in February. I was setting out bags and water 4 days before the event, and watched the buds open and turn red this last week. I never used Techno all week, and once I even set my backpack down on a patch. I honestly believed that these courses had a lot less poison oak than many courses I had run in the past, and I apologize for my misconception to those of you that felt there was too much P.O.
In December, I visited the terrain on the north side of Quimby Road, thinking that it would be nice for new territory. I designed quite a few legs in this area and went to check them out. After field checking the reentrants and cliffs along Quimby Road, I threw these courses out. The reentrant to get to Quimby was miserable and the cliffs on the other side were impassable. The only other alternative was to shuttle competitors over and have them run back on a trail. I have been responsible for organizing shuttles on four other occasions, and I decided I didn't want to deal with shuttles for our event. (The last time I drove shuttles, I didn't finish a course when I started late.)
I really enjoyed the middle-distance event Kent set for the A-meet in 2007, and those courses were my inspiration. I also remember when Mikkel Conradi set a tight course at Monte Bello a few years ago and how much fun I had. I tend to push myself much harder on shorter legs, so my goal for the middle of the advanced courses was to set a lot of short legs with forking and frequent direction changes. The recent survey results mentioned that sprints were enjoyed by many competitors, so this section was designed to simulate a sprint situation in a wilderness setting.
In January, I was concerned about the power lines, fences, and local knowledge making the courses too easy, and I emailed Joe Scarborough and Dan Greene for their comments regarding turning some line features off on the advanced maps. At an A-meet I attended in New Zealand, the fences were removed from our maps, making it hard to relocate in a replanted pine forest. Dan suggested that this technique might be good for a training event, and running at speed is much different than field checking, and I shouldn't worry about it. Joe had some good comments on fairness and standards, and I decided not to introduce anything like this to the event — especially the WRIS courses. It was interesting to look at Matthias' route on RouteGadget, and see his 3+ minute error at Red #4. The power lines could have been a good catching feature. If not for this bobble, he was giving Tapio a very good race.
Most of my time was spent designing a kinder, gentler Brown course. The club's recent survey had comments that our Brown courses tended to be set too hard, and I tried to make the alternate average climb at 3% or less (2.7%). The published climb was 6%, and the worst leg was 12%. For Brown, I tried hard to keep the climb to a minimum and provide alternate navigational legs that were a bit longer by contouring. I wanted the perfect balance between a 100-point F-18 going straight, and someone who wanted a more leisurely physical challenge. My big tradeoff was challenging legs, climb, and doglegs, and I did about 3 courses with many revisions after field testing. I was happy to see Joan's RouteGadget route from Brown #5 to Brown #6 was exactly what I hoped to accomplish. It would be nice if more Brown competitors would draw their routes and provide some constructive criticism in order for me to improve my course-setting skills. The pink error legs indicated by WinSplits for Brown shows a fair distribution among the controls, so I think the map was really good for the Brown course.
On the other hand, a lot of errors (WinSplits assumptions) occurred around Red #11, and Luc mentioned to me that these boulders could use some mapping improvements. I tended to agree, but thought that the location was fairly obvious — especially from above. Since Blue courses are the longest, I strategically made Blue #13 veer off before Red #11, and I wonder how much of the error rate was due to this factor, including elephant tracks and other competitors leading you down too early.
One goal that I was happy to accomplish was that the advanced courses traversed the intermediate and beginner courses a couple times. I hoped that this would inspire competitors on the beginner courses when seeing advanced competitors bounding across their path at speed.
There was plenty of water and no water controls ran dry.
One of my favorite legs was the one leading to the GO control. The easy road run was about 800 meters, and the straight run with 2 contours of elevation gain and a little strategic fight was about 400–450 meters. I was consistently faster on versions of the direct route. I wondered how many competitors would be tired and opt for the easier trail. I tend to get distracted in areas with lots of detail, and I thought that the campground would prove to be an urban distraction. Tapio seems to have started this leg correctly, but turned off a bit too early and got into some fight. I think Matthias could have saved 30 seconds if he had taken the route Alex Finch (Blue course) took. This was my fastest line, having prior knowledge and test running all the route choices.
Including reviewing the guidelines, designing, field checking, map improvements, learning 2 new software programs, and bag placement, I spent over 100 hours in these courses.
This was my first time using OCAD (both 8 and 6 with two map versions) and Condes. I am crazy about the tape-measure tool, and the "adjacent control" feature in Condes. Many of the adjacent controls were exactly 100 m apart. I like to think of this year's courses as a control pick-up volunteer's dream.
I want to thank those of you who talked with me after the race and have drawn their routes on RouteGadget. My goal of improving route choices and selections on some legs appears to be confirmed, but I still want to make it better. I would appreciate any other constructive criticisms in order to improve courses next time.