Click here for my Ridley Sprint 1 map.

Click here for my Ridley Sprint 2 map.

First 2 sprints from this weekend. I'm not a very good sprinter, making a parallel error en route to #8 in the first one. Second one was pretty clean, and my best result. I guess after 3 wins in a row on long to very long races, its time to be put in my place. It really does feel like I'm running the same speed in 3 hour and 20 minute races. I did lose a place on the second race as I had to turn the e-punch units on, which costs about 1500 ms or so per control.

I found the terrain unpleasantly green for a sprint. Also, I personally didn't really see much of the distinction between the various shades of green. I don't like this map, and probably never will. For sprints, we really need to get away from blowing up an old map and calling it a sprint, but I'm not sure how to do that.

One thing that came up was complaints about the control codes being printed on the map. This is one thing I've been pushing, as it seems to be easier (at least for me), and seems to be widespread in Europe. The complaint was too much clutter; I'm not sure I agree, and it would be interesting to see where the majority stood on this.

One of the things I've noticed with it is that it is harder to find the start triangle. That seems obvious; there are more numbers to deal with and parse. I think this should be remedied, as it adds luck, I think the way to do this is to show the relative position of the start triangle on a blank sheet in the start area.

I also think the putative clutter issue could be alleviated by going to 1:4000. I think we should go to 1:4000 anyway, for sprints. The only argument I've heard against it is that it would be an awkward scale for pace counting. I don't pace count in any race, so I'll admit I don't empathize with this, but even if I was a pace counter, I'm still not sure I would pace count in a sprint, but what do I know?

Well, in any case, I'd like to see a trend to 1:4000, and see how it feels/goes over ...