As being a first hand participant, working timing, and S.O. of the chief of
timing Tues/Wednesday, I thought I'd give my impresitons
:-).
>1. Remove the audit, or at least reduce the frequency of the audit
>(though I wasn't at Nationals this year, so I have no idea how that
>was handled).
The audit is very important, due to the sheets on course are the official
account of your run. With the fast pace, it's easy to miss a cone or two in
timing or get it on the wrong car, so competitors don't really know what is
right until the audit. With that, doing them twice a run may seem a lot,
and on smaller events, like some Divisionals, I would agree, but with the
larger events, a mid run Audit is essential to get the copies of the course
audit sheets posted prior to a competitors next run. This would not be
possible in a fast pased event like nats if audits were only done once a
run, at least not for the first 1/3 or so competitors. This is critical if
you are one that values knowing if you previous run was clean or not :-)
>2. Increase the number of rungroups, but remove the number of course
>walks. You might feel that this reduces the number of course walks
>you can take, but if you'd just train for marathons, as we do in the
>San Francisco Bay Area, you can increase your course walk laps in a
>shorter amount of time. I encourage interval training, or maybe about
>15 seconds rest between laps. Builds your aerobic capacity. Pace is
>the key.
Asside from the athletic humor, I think there is a point of diminishing
returns on run groups: To many and you have to much fragmentation or down
time in managing lots of groups. To few and you have enormous work/run time
that is to hard on everyone. I think 5 a nats has worked well, or about 50
cars per run group.
>3. Increase the number of days at Nationals.
This would help the pace, but at this point I don't see it is needed. Each
day started at 8am and finished by 4pm on both courses!, with over 1100
entrants. Now running cars every 15 seconds sucks, and I would have put my
foot down if I were chief of timing, but I think this was only done a couple
of times on the first day in fear of finishing at 8 in the dark %-). Also,
the limit to 15min for in between course walks was a bit thin, but if you
were ready to walk when they openned the course, you could easly get to the
end before the wanted to shoo folks off.
I don't see any real changes needed to support 1200 entrants, based on how
proactive all the organizers were in keeping the event running.
---JCG
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