I hope you all enjoyed being a part of the biggest Urban race held in the UK to date (if you don’t count Sprint races). The university campus and surrounding areas provided some terrific Urban orienteering, and I really enjoyed setting you those challenging courses to round off such a successful Croeso week. The feedback I received on the day was very positive, and I am grateful to those of you that found me outside the download tent to pass on your appreciation of our efforts.

I haven’t had a chance to analyse the results in detail, but a cursory review suggests that the winning times were about right for a Middle Distance race, so I hope you thought so too.

The planning of courses on a university campus is not without its challenges. The university asked us to relocate the near Start only three weeks before the event. We managed to do this, but it did leave us very short of time to check proof maps and make sure that the new start set up would work. I think those of you who started at the Blue Start can probably testify to our success in solving this challenge!

We spent the rest day marking up over half of the competition maps with out of bounds areas that were not notified to us until the Tuesday before the event. With hindsight, some competitors on course 14 may have benefited from more information about this than they received on their maps and in the start lanes, but we were trying to provide competitors with the right amount of information, rather than “information overload” in the start lanes. However, we did have to come up with our plan at very short notice.

Our challenges didn’t end there - there was some maintenance work on a building near control 213 which didn’t start until the Thursday of the Croeso week. We took the view that it was still safe to access all of the routes we thought would be available, but I do realise that some were unwilling to cross the temporary barrier that had been put up - I hope you didn’t feel too disadvantaged.

It went from bad to worse when a maintenance team arrived on campus at 8am on the morning of the event to dig up and resurface the crossings over the access road into the main entrance to the campus. This affected the carefully planned safe crossing point for the youngest of our competitors, so I am grateful for the sterling work that was done to make sure that our youngest competitors were still able to cross the access road safely.

However, what I saw on the day was nearly 2,000 orienteers really enjoying the challenge that the campus and surrounding areas provided. I’m glad that you all had such a good day.

Mike Forrest (BOK)