Belhus Woods results published
Thanks to all competitors who helped make our Belhus Woods event on April 13th a success. Some tough courses and long times, but the weather stayed mostly fine.
We had 118 competitors on the eight courses.
Pictures from the event are on our Facebook page.
Results can be seen here.
Plot your route on RouteGadget here.
See the Winsplits analysis here.
Planners Comments
Firstly my thanks to all who helped me get these courses over the line; especially Colin who put far more hours in than me, traipsing around Belhus checking control sites, taping, route checking (without which many of the courses would not have been viable due to the vegetation changes), collecting SI kit and sorting it for the event; and Paul who as well as expertly controlling spent a whole day gardening in the western area to make some of my route choices navigable.
Perhaps the event details should have said:
Armchair Planner - Guy Lidbury
Assistant Planner and Event Organiser - Colin Jackson
Type Setters - Colin Jackson, Paul Beckett, Janet Biggs
Belhus Voluntary Gardeners - Colin Jackson and Paul Beckett
IT expert - Tony Biggs
Belhus is a difficult area on which to plan good courses due to there being so many paths, hence so many controls to keep you off them, but I hope I succeeded and kept you thinking for most of your course. I wanted the start to be very near to the car park, but the ditch along the path leading east from the start was 4 feet deep in water when I started planning, so the thought of stacking pallets up entered my head, but thankfully the recent sun dried it up. The brown course however did still visit a fairly full ditch on the west side, but nothing you brown runners couldn’t deal with.
In trying to get a little training in before the JK I tried the blue course myself, and having not personally visited most of the control sites previously it is amazing how little it helps knowing the course prior to running it. One small snag I found, as did a few others, was control 131 vegetation corner; if you approached from the south path and cut in, there it was, but if coming from the north through the wood or the path it did seem much further than mapped. So my apologies if it added to your time and detracted from your run; a few small map corrections I think will be in order prior to the next event.
I thank you all for coming on what was for the most part a bright sunny morning.
Guy
If you enjoyed the event, and would like to investigate joining HAVOC, then details are here.
Our next events are:
Forest: GLOSS event at Hornchurch Country Park, on June 29th
Street/Hybrid: Essex midweek series at Norsey Wood, on April 30th