Willesley

Having agreed to organise an event that had no car park, always meant this was going to be an interesting event.

The original plan for car parking was to use the Scout Campsite next to Willesley Woods, unfortunately due to a change of date to allow the Warwick City Race to go ahead, meant a new car park had to be found at very short notice. As it turned out the new venue at Donnisthorpe Miners Access Centre was excellent. This was by far the best toilets I have seen on any orienteering event.

This new event centre, meant it was only sensible to have the shorter courses (White, Yellow and Orange) running on the separate map of Donisthorpe and keeping the rest of the event on the Willesley Map as originally planned.

I would like to thank Bob for not putting starts and finish’s in hard to reach places, Peter for being a very laid back controller and allowing myself and Bob to run the event we wanted.

Also I must say a big thank you to the people who help me run the event, some of whom were only asked on the day!

I hope you all enjoyed the run in the woods and return in the future to see how the area is growing.

Planners Comments

Firstly, I'd like to thank the Controller, Peter Hornsby, for his good advice, as I am a relatively novice Planner at District Events. I tried to use the area available to its best advantage and plan some interesting courses. Due to the fairly long walk from the car park to Willesley, it was decided to run the short courses at the adjacent Donisthorpe Woodlands. This is a good area for thess courses, using a newly updated map.

Apart from the starting area at Willesley for the longer courses, the remainder of the map had never been used before. Quite a bit of time was spent looking at the feasibility of routes as there are some very inpenetrable fences and hedges, which I hope you didn't encounter. Again, due to the shape of the area, it was quite difficult to reduce the length of Light Green and Green any further, but we were keen that all the longer courses should use the new parts of the map. This is a very rapidly changing area, and thanks are due to the mapper, Simon Starkey who made a number of changes as we investigates the area.

The event was admirably organised by Roger Phillips and I hope that you all enjoyed your runs. I certainly enjoyed the planning exercise, despite some problems on the morning with the SI boxes. I did more running that morning than I had intended, and rather faster than I expected!

Bob Haskins.

Rogers search for suitable car parking gave us an ideal car park for Donisthorpe but put us about a kilometre from the nearest useable point of Willesley. The decision to run the shorter courses at Donisthorpe meant that we were in effect using three orienteering areas, as the majority of Willesley was new to orienteering.

Although this saved the shorter courses a long walk, it made for difficulties with the Light Green which deserved use of Willesley but was always going to be slightly too long. We hoped that you didn’t mind too much and thought that the delights of running in a brand new area were enough compensation.

Our early morning discovery of a problem with the older style electronic boxes compounded an already hectic morning and meant that there had to be a 15 minute delay to the long start, which on reflection should have been slightly more.

My thanks go to all who helped and made the event a great success. Particular mention of Roger who organised carefully and without fuss, and signposted the event from everywhere! I would also like to praise the planner who, apart from exceeding at all the planning bits, also had to recollect some SI boxes that had just gone out to bring them back in so that Kevin, our electronics guru, could reprogramme them so we could rush out to replace them (starting at about 9.45). Well done Bob you must have run miles.

I hope that you enjoyed your runs in the pleasant conditions and that you will come back to see this rapidly changing part of the National Forest.

Blue	Results	Splits
Brown	Results	Splits
Green	Results	Splits
Light Green	Results	Splits
Orange	Results	Splits
White	Results	Splits
Yellow	Results	Splits

Final Results for Willesley District Event 06-Oct-2007