Category: Orienteering

Yes, the fifth running of the City of London Race, the world’s second biggest standalone urban orienteering race, will be happening, & as for previous years, I will be occasionally be blogging about it, as the mapping progresses.

Here’s the new bit I am planning on mapping this year (in red), along with what is already mapped (in green). The mapped area now far exceeds what will fit on the A3+ paper, so the red section actually represents around a third of the what will appear on the 2012 map. Another important caveat is that access agreements are still being negotiated, so it is not a 100% certainty that this is what this year’s map will look like.

The areas:

1. Hatton Garden. London’s jewellery and diamond quarter, with an interesting set of side-alleys.
2. Gray’s Inn and surrounding area – the former subject to access.
3. Great Ormond Street – the area around the famous children’s hospital.
4. Mount Pleasant – the area around the huge Royal Mail facility.
5. Lincoln’s Inn – subject to access.
6. Corram’s Fields. A backup area, in case we have to move our race HQ to around here – this is not our Plan A though, and we are keeping our preferred race HQ venue under wraps for now – it is cool though! Junior courses would then be in this park, which is particularly apt as adults are only allowed into the park when accompanied by a child!

Map from Cloudmade, contains OpenStreetMap data.

Thomas Schöps is developing a suite of open-source tools, Open Orienteering, including an application for creating orienteering maps called Open Orienteering Mapper (not to be confused with my own OpenOrienteeringMap. He is updating his blog regularly with development process, and today announced an alpha release of Mapper. The application runs on both Windows and Linux and shortly, following an imminent patch, Macs. The impact of a completely free, cross-platform application for creating “proper” orienteering maps, should not be underestimated. Having used both OCAD (PC only, expensive) and Illustrator/MapStudio (expensive) to create/edit maps in the past, and having failed to get Inkscape/MapStudio to work, I am quite excited about this. At the moment, ISOM maps can be created, but there are plans to include ISSOM (sprint standard) symbols sets soon. I am looking forward to creating my first OO Mapper map!

A not of caution – if you want try the software, be aware that is in an early (alpha) state and that you will need to have development tools installed in order to retrieve it (through git) and build and run it – the application is not ready yet for non-developers!

Mapper, along with the other applications in the Open Orienteering toolset, is being managed through Sourceforge and there is a bug tracker which already contains lots of ideas for further expanding the application.

I’ve been mining the British Orienteering event results pages and have produced a websites presenting the results in a more effective way – i.e. athlete focused rather than event focused. I’m also having a go at recalculating the ranking score based on this data.

Unfortunately there are a couple of flaws:

• The BOF ID is not available on the source website, so I have had to construct a key based on name (which can be misspelled on results uploads from time-to-time) and club (ditto). This mainly works, except where people change club, in which case their results, run under other clubs, that contribute to their ranking score, won’t be included.
• It turns out that, with each new result upload, all the ranking points for all events going back the whole of the last year – possibly more – are recalculated. This has the effect of old scores drifting slightly – I wasn’t expecting the points to fluctuate in such a way. The effect is mainly small – so far one of my scores has drifted by 1 point – but another person’s score has drifted by 7 points. I could mitigate this by scraping all results over the last year every night, but this would put strain on BOF’s servers and they would probably not appreciate it – it would be over 5000 page requests over the course of several hours. So, instead, I’m updating the most recent 25 events nightly and may manually resync the whole year on an ad-hoc basis. The result is that, after a while, the scores don’t match precisely with those on the source website.

The toughness scores for each event are just a bit of fun and based on the details of the course, not how well people did on it. The urban shading is also just based on the name of the event, rather than any specific metadata on the event that I am accessing. Such metadata may be available in the event details section of the source website but I am just using the results information here.

The collation of a large number of results has highlighted various data problems, such as results appearing as HH:MM rather than MM:SS, or x,xxx km instead of x.xxx km. Unfortunately one of my own (few) event result uploads suffered the first problem. This doesn’t affect the points at all, because the times within each course are only used on a relative, not absolute, basis, but it does preclude me, for example, totalling the “yearly run hours” for each athlete, without cleaning up the data on my side.

You can see the stats here – type in your name and club to see your stats. See the notes on the search page, e.g. most Level D events not included. You can also compare two people, looking at where they ran the same courses at the same event.

I’ve had an idea for a new type of orienteering club for London. One with a slightly different focus to the current ones. My inspiration is City Runners and Centrum OK, and to a lesser extent Stragglers RC and Fetch Everyone.

• Its aim would be member training, socialising and attending external events in a coordinated way, rather than putting on events.*
• Its initial life would be as an community orienteering group (it is unclear whether such entities can be affiliated to the national federation) moving to full club status when membership numbers – and so finances – allowed, and certainly before it put on public events. Alternatively, and probably more likely, it could exist as a satellite of another club, such as MADO, which is/was a satellite of HOC.*
• Membership would be very cheap – say £4 (+national/regional membership) or even free – it would be the cheapest way to be a member of an orienteering club and a national federation – especially as local-level national/regional membership is also free for the first year, making membership completely free for new people.**
• It would potentially affiliate also to England Athletics – although as community running group rather than as a full running club.*
• It would be an open, geographical club with core membership intended to be in, but not limited to, London Zones 1-4, or people who are otherwise very well connected to the centre of London.*
• It would be called something like Central London or Cross River, to reflect its central London focus. Acronyms for the club name would be avoided as far as possible.*
• It would have little kit of its own. It would probably have a small set of training flags, possibly acquired through the “Year in a Box”, bought from the national federation.
• It would have a significant sponsor.

PROMOTION
• Promotion would be entirely online. It would have a small, low-key website, an announcement email list, a Facebook group and probably a Twitter account.*
• Its primary form of promotion, announcements etc would be through the Facebook group.*
• If funds allowed, a limited amount of advertising would be placed through Facebook and Google Adwords.
• It would not have a paper newsletter, print flyers or indeed have any paper presence.*

EVENTS AND TRAINING
• It would in fact run some events, membership willing, but these would mainly be in the Street-O format (both score and point-to-point). Eventually it would put on a couple of Park Race style events in the summer time, once a small number of parks had been mapped by members of the club and members had gained the necessary qualifications.***
• Professional mappers would not be employed. If possible, the club’s maps would be produced using FOSS.
• As soon as its finances allowed, first-claim members would be able to attend all events put on by the club for free.
• Its members would be actively encouraged to regularly take part in local events put on by the other London clubs and, if available, join such clubs as second-claim members.
• It would eventually have a club kit but this would be in the form of runners’ technical tops rather than orienteering kit or runners’ race kit.*
• It would have a club night run from a regular and central London location, probably a friendly pub. This would often take the form of a run rather than technical training.*

Inspired by:
* City Runners
** Stragglers
*** Centrum OK

Photo by timbobee.

Here’s some Wordles that I’ve created with the runs and events data available on the British Orienteering website, based on 166,000 runs on 5000 courses across 600 events between January 2010 and now.

1. Courses put on by clubs:

vs Actual runs done, by course:

…which shows that we put on a lot of Orange and Yellow courses, but really everyone wants to run Green or Blue.

2. Actual runs done, by club of the runner:

vs Actual runs done, by organising club:

…which shows that some clubs are mainly about organising events (e.g. HOC), some are mainly about running in events (e.g. BOK), but most are about both.

3. Finally – which regions see the most number of runs?

S(OA) = Scotland, W = Wales. The rest are English regions: NE/NW/SE/SW, EA (East Anglia), SC = (South Central), YH (Yorkshire/Humberside), EM/WM (E/W Midlands). While large events that rotate around the regions on a multi-year timetable will distort this, some very large events (e.g. the Scottish 6 Days) don’t appear on British Orienteering’s system as having a region associated with them, so will not appear in the above Wordle.