The Swithland Summer League took place only 11 days after the East Midlands League colour coded event, To make the evening event a bit different whilst using the same area, and partly for variety because I was Planner for both, the Summer League was planned as a "dog bone" score. Whilst making competitors decide on their route to visit the controls, the pair format also allows the planner to design legs. The competitor completes a leg designed by the planner, and then chooses a route to get to the next pair in such a way as to minimise the distance, and optimise their time.

Hopefully, (and because some of the control sites were common to both events), this put a new slant on using the same area twice. I also weighted the pairs, making some quite simple and short (largely using the controls on the short course), with harder pairs worth more points in Swithland and with the highest scoring pairs in The Brand. This was partly because The Brand is more difficult to get through, but also to encourage competitors to take a run through this private and fascinating area which we use by kind permission of the owners, the Martin family.

The event proved to be popular, and so I hope you enjoyed the format - most people got the idea of how it worked. We even had two visitors from Wellington, New Zealand, who were in the vicinity. The results on the website are quite detailed, giving details of controls visited, and also split times from Autodownload.

The time limit on the long score was 60 minutes, and one competitor completed all 30 controls in 63 minutes, so the estimate of what was possible was not far from realistic. Incidentally, I planned a course around what I thought was a fairly optimistic route, and this came out to be 6.4Km. I also plotted the winer's course, and although slightly different to mine, hers also proved to be 6.4Km, quite impressive considering I could sit at the computer and think about mine.

I'd like to thank Laurie who helped me on the evening as the registration proved pretty busy for a time, and also to Mark Foxwell, who converted the results from my Excel spreadsheet, througn Autodownload, and who also set up Routegadget for the event.

Bob Haskins.