Event Details
Club: | Midlands MBO |
Event Name: | Erewash Valley, Nottingham |
Date: | 15/03/20 |
Format: | MBO Score |
Mapping: | Ordnance Survey |
Time Limit: | 3 hrs |
National League: | - |
League: | Midlands MBO Series 2020 (Round 4 of ) |
Electronic Punch: | SportIdent |
Event Report
What to do; the first event you set up goes somewhat better than expected, so how do you build upon it?
Don't change it too much of course; take the best bits and drop the ones that garnered the very few adverse comments that we did receive.
It became quite clear that starting in the middle of an urban area and the wrong side of the tracks is not as interesting as we had thought and caused a number of competitors various headaches.
This being the case we decided to use the bulk of the 2019 event but shift the map about 5km to the West, dropping the urban West of Nottingham, to head closer to the East of Derby.
Come the New Year, albeit we had a revised event area, we were struggling to find suitable places to hold the event; either poorly placed, or with nowhere near enough parking for our needs. Online map searching wasn't all that fruitful, so on a cold, wet, late January Sunday we went old school and toured around the local villages scouting out possible venues.
One place that we could find online but with no details came up trumps; the booking secretary having already spotted us from across the playing field as we arrived very wet and muddy to look it up became the event centre at Stanley.
It also turns out there is a distinct lack of acceptable trails in the extended area, so with a bit of creative map cropping and rotation we were able to find a reasonable A4 sized 1:50,000 map, again blown up to A3 to maximise the level of detail to the trails on canals etc.
Storms Ciara, Denis and Jorge did their best and certainly turned sections of the terrain into liquid mud that was completely un-rideable; although we did highlight these routes as best avoided, a couple of competitors did decide to use the worst of the lot, to their surprise of just how bad the water logging was.
Thanks once again to everyone who joined us for the event; not a single adverse comment was received, other than the surprise of the state of the water logged sections; apologies it was a wet start but at least the showers passed quickly enough.
Congratulations to Will Dixon on leading with 390 out of the 510 available. Also to the first-timers that joined us, that despite the conditions seemed to wholly enjoy the event - we hope you return soon for more.
Once again my huge thanks to Graeme Barker and Richard Chaney for the ongoing assistance in route checking, manning the start / finish line and checkpoint collection.
And all this in the changing and challenging backdrop of coronavirus; lets hope the situation doesn't put a halt on these events and that we can sensibly come together to head off into the countryside for a few hours of scenic self isolation.
See you out in the field; although likely somewhere quite different next year.
Richard