Marsden Moor Regional Event. Planners Comments

Sunday, 4th March 2007

First some Thankyou's

1 Thank you all for coming, on what was forecasted to be high winds with heavy downpours. It was better than expected, but you all missed the worst weather which was when we gathered the controls in! It hailed at one point!

2 A big thankyou to Dickie Wren for helping put out the controls on March Hill and on top of the Moor!.... and collecting them in.

3 A big thankyou to Martin Reynolds who helped collect in some controls, that lightened my load.

4 A big thankyou to Bob Page for organising, a second time! The higher than expected river caused a few headaches! It is usually always a trickle, Yorkshire Water taking away large amounts to Scammonden. Not this year though!

5 A big thankyou to Ian Watson of MDOC for keeping me in control a second time!

6 And thanks to all the helpers I didn't see!

7 And a thank you to Mike Pownall for helping program the SI boxes.

8 And last but not least to Ian McMillan for re-mapping the area!

Now down to the Nitty Gritty!

Planning courses at Marsden is probably one of the hardest planning challenges this side of Huddersfield! The top of the moor is terribly exposed to the weather! (Remember last year!) The bottom of the moor is terrible, with TUSSOCKS in places up to my waist, and I am 1.82m or 6' tall! Trying to find some decent parking is a nightmare.

In the end I decided that I was going to only use areas that had the best runnabilty, and where there were bad tussocks I gave a less evil path alternative. I also decided to split Senior and Junior courses and have 2 starts. The low one for the Juniors/Novices, so they at least, started in shelter! (The river being up, was not expected as I mentioned before!). I'm sorry for the evil start there, but there is little else! JM/W3 and orange was probably a bit too easy to start but along other line
features was horrible! At least at the end you had to think a bit!

At the high start, most people told me that as they had already walked up that hill, they were well warmed up! I got you here so that you could start straight into some interesting contours, but each course was gaffled, so although it appeared to be a convoy of people you still had to keep in touch with the map or end up following the wrong person. Watching through binoculars it was interesting to see many of you hesitating at various points early on. The shorter courses stayed on this bit, looped around and came back, through the fast (but slippy in the rain) bit at the end. Yesterday it was lovely in the
sunshine!

I deliberately gave the medium courses a route choice that gave you the option of avoiding going low and ending up in tussocks, I then contoured you around by the main road, it was fine to use it! BUT I am told that a couple of the
gully/bridge/culvert wall things were not mapped and some of you came down too early for the crag. I didn't notice this in the planning stage, and can only assume that last year the offending features were obscured by bracken, tussocks, or more likely torched cars! Apologies for that. I hope you all enjoyed the bumps below March hill! Then I gave you easy running back to the
finish, avoiding ankle breaking tussocks on the way!

The longer courses went out on to the moor proper. But this has been spoilt by some rather large fenced enclosures. If the mist had been down it would have been interesting. Having said that I tried to get you all on lines, which if you lost touch or made a compass error you would lose time, but would be able to re-locate quickly enough on said fence!

So overall I think the courses may have been a little short, perhaps with more climb than I would have liked, but I wanted you all to go away thinking that Marsden Moor wasn't all that bad a place to run after all! As I write this I am unaware of finishing times, but I think they were about right!

Graham Lloyd