We enjoyed a really nice score course at Eno River. The weather was cool, with no precipitation; and the river level was relatively low. Some runners got to venture into some newly-acquired park land, including an old quarry in the far north. All in all, it was a very successful event.

I designed this year’s course with a slightly different mindset than in years past. Typically, I design a score course so that, hopefully, only the top runner clears the course, and does so right as their time expires. This year, I designed a shorter-than-usual course, and fully expected some of the faster runners to clear it. I then tried to arrange the point values to make people who could not clear the course really have to think about whether certain controls were worth going after. For the most part this design strategy worked. Although only one runner, Brian Thompson, was able to clear the entire course, there were some very close battles among later runners; and the decisions about which controls to acquire turned out to be critical.

If a runner knows that he or she cannot clear the course, decisions about which controls to go after are extremely important. This is illustrated in the results of the 2-hour event, where Vladimir Stemkovski was very strategic about going after high-scoring controls, and won the event by a very wide margin.

Huge thanks to Debra and Jeff Rezeli, who came out in the rain the day before the event to set out more than a dozen of the most distant controls. Also, many thanks to Paul Emmerson, Matt Kirk, Diego Nieves, and Debra Rezeli who, as of this writing, have agreed to pick up controls.

In the results that follow, several people were moved from the 2-hour event for which they registered into the 4-hour event. These people have an asterisk by their name. This was done to preserve the points that they earned and to avoid their time penalty. In retrospect, my idea to place people automatically into the division in which they place the highest is difficult to implement when there are unequal numbers of competitors in the different divisions. To make matters worse, a decision to switch a given person into another division is not independent of the decisions for other people. Because of these unforeseen complications, I simply placed everyone who was overtime in the 2-hour division into the 4-hour division.

Please check the results below and make sure that they jibe with your experience and your printed results. There were some very close and surprising races, and I’d like to make sure that they’re all accurate.

If you have a GPS track you can add your course and check out the others’ on Brian’s Routegadget page.

Eno River Score-O, Split times

2022-12-04

* Registered for 2-hour event, but was moved to the 4-hour race to preserve their points.

Created 2022-12-04 15:57:51 with SI-Droid Event 1.15.4

Filed under: Event Results, Latest News by David Waller