Category: Orienteering

As a Saturday-lunchtime project, I have created a heatmap of where the 2700-odd geolocated orienteering races have been held in Great Britain in the last two years.

As you would expect, clusters appear around the main urban areas, where the population sizes supply participation for many local events being put on. Another major bright-spot is the Lake District, generally recognised to be the finest orienteering area in England. Other areas, such as the Cotswolds NW of Oxford, seem to be somewhat underused.

If you have a browser than can handle the HTML5 Canvas tag (i.e. not Internet Explorer!) you can view the heatmap here. Zoom into your local town or city to see if events have been held there – when zooming in, you’ll need to adjust the two sliders most of the way to the right, so that individual events show up. With the individual settings, a single, isolated event will have very little impact on the heatmap.

A look at the London area:

The heatmap was possible thanks to the excellent Heatmap library produced for OpenLayers by Bjoern Hoehrmann. The map is powered by OpenLayers, with an OpenStreetMap basemap. I’ve used a custom colour ramp, based on one supplied by Colorbrewer. The custom map adornments are supplied by MapBox.

Cross-posted from my research blog.

Five years ago, I created a mashup of forthcoming orienteering fixtures in Great Britain, as listed by the sport’s national governing body, British Orienteering, on its website. It was based on the Google Maps v2 API, and a regular scraping of the HTML on their website, and was a set of pins on a map, coloured by the number of weeks to the event. On clicking a pin, you got a popup balloon with details of the event, and a link to the organising club’s website. A postcode locator, based on data from the NPEMap project, was added, so you could focus on events in your local area. You could also filter out far away events.

A couple of years later, British Orienteering’s web developers added their own map to their website – Google Maps v2 API based, with pins coloured by the number of weeks to the event, and a popup balloon, a postcode search and distance filter etc etc… The Unique Selling Point of my fixtures map was lost.

So, when a rewrite of British Orienteering’s website just before Christmas broke my map, I took the opportunity to rewrite it, as a vacation project, using the technologies I’ve been using a lot in 2010 – namely OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap, OS OpenData and coloured vector circles. The map is bigger, brighter, and hopefully more useable than the official map and my previous version.

You can see the new map here – with a mass of dots representing forthcoming fixtures, and circles surrounding the “home” postcode, backed by OpenStreetMap, with the postcode locator based on CodePoint Open from Ordnance Survey OpenData. Only the locator uses a database, the rest of the webpage is constructed on-the-fly from a webpage regularly copied from the British Orienteering website.

Not Scarborough…

The map remains subject to the quality of the data entered on the corresponding list – there is some limited tidying up of the data, but it’s difficult to correct grid references that result in events being in the sea – there’s currently one in the Irish Sea, as the event registrant entered “GR” as the grid reference letters, and this just so happens to be the location of the GR myriad. There is still work to be done on my new map, such as spotting obvious errors like this, guessing locations where a grid reference isn’t supplied, and perhaps including Northern Ireland’s events.

Incidentally, my original orienteering web map, which inspired my fixtures map, was one showing orienteering maps, it was written way back in August 2004, using a Flash mapping package by Map Bureau, with dots superimposed on top of a map pinched from Wikipedia. We’ve come a long way.

Nike’s unveiled a new GPS watch – the Nike+ SportWatch (press release) for runners, today at CES. It gets launched in the US and UK in April, and other countries soon after.

Currently Garmin has a near-monopoly on sophisticated personal GPS-based watches designed for sports users, with their Forerunner 205/305/405s. They are very popular with orienteers, as being able to record your route means you can graphically see mistakes made, and the different leg speed zones, during a race. Often, at orienteering events, a substantial portion of competitors will be wearing a Garmin Forerunner, so the introduction of a major new player in the field could be very interesting for the sport, and the new competition will hopefully bring prices down for the Garmins too.

The “killer feature” must be the integrated USB socket – no more balancing your GPS watch on a cradle and bringing along a USB cable – you can plug the Nike watch straight into a Mac or PC to download your run data. It also records your heart rate, but “separate heart rate monitor required”.

The GPS element of the Nike watch is powered by Tom Tom, Garmin’s main rivals in the personal GPS space.

Engadget has a hands-on video here.

The Warwick Town Race was the final urban orienteering race in this year’s Nopesport Urban League, so I thought I would recap the six urban races I enjoyed the most this year – most of them Urban League but with some non-league ones too:

Best 6:

6. Nottingham
I had been meaning to visit Nottingham for ages, and enjoyed this great city centre race, which included the ceremonial Park Estate, an interesting leg up and through the castle complex, and a start/finish in the city’s central square, right underneath a big wheel!

5. Carlisle
A bit of a trek to get to this one, but it was worth the effort, as excellent course planning took us on the sights and included some classic route choice legs, a shopping-centre control near the end, a maze control, and, like Nottingham, a start and finish right in the main town square – excellent for promoting the sport!

4. Lincoln
My third outing here for an urban race, and finally the event is getting the numbers and recognition it deserves. We didn’t get to go in the castle this time, or the city walls or university campus, but instead, like Carlisle, we got a maze control, and a good mix between modern urban areas and the historic centre. Lincoln is one of my favourite orienteering cities and on my must-do list.

3. Didcot
An unexpected delight – the make was entirely in a Milton Keynes-esque housing estate with wiggly roads and unanticipated barriers. Some excellent planning kept the technicality going all the way around. I fell into numerous route traps.

2. Edinburgh
This race is always very early in the year, so is chilly, but the weather was once again sunny. This year’s courses didn’t focus so heavily on the intricate Royal Mile, housing estate and university areas, but the less technical focus was more than made up by the spectacular views on Calton Hill, a section through Princes Street gardens, and some spectacular leg choices including a possible route right through the city station.

1. City of London
A bit cheeky perhaps to put the race I founded and my club organises at No. 1, but this year’s was even better than the first two years. We had a huge turnout – over 700 running on the day – and the race also got the club together spectacularly, running the show smoothly on the day. With Alan as Race Director and Matthais Mahr (of Venice Street Race fame) as the Course Designer this year, the courses and situations were both superb – the weather being perfect, for the third time in a row, also helped. The second half of the courses were in Bankside and Bermondsey, which meant crowds of passers-by were encountered by the competitors – not something experienced in the City proper at the weekend. Next year’s race is already in the planning and will hopefully be even bigger and better.

Cities that I most want to run an urban race in:

• Bristol
• Bath
• St Albans (happening in 2011!)

At tomorrow’s City of London Race I’m trying something a bit interactive – a Twitter Wall and Photo Wall for the event. Tweet your photos and comments with hashtag #cityrace and they’ll appear up at http://cityrace.org/live/.

I’ll be taking a few photos of the event and posting them up during the course of the day.