Almscliff Crag at control #9

A very late report on the 11th December race from the Squinting Cat at Harrogate. I ordered the maps based on a few more entering after lunchtime on the Thursday and luckily ordered 60 as by the time entries closed at 23:59 we had 60 entrants.  52 of you entered on the day and seemed to go on numerous routes. Top 3 finishes were Ian Furlong with 429 points who rode 37km, Simon Coiley on 389 points who rode 35.5km and Carrick Armer on 385 points who rode 33.7 km. Other category winners were David Day in the Male 0ver 60 class who was a very credible 5th with 359 points who rode 33.5 km. Top Mixed pairs were Lois and Adrian Parker who scored 350 points and rode 31.6km . First Lady was Sue Booth on 309 points who rode 32,9km and top generation team were Jeffrey and Laura Booth who rode with Mieszko Lichtarowicz they scored 307 points and rode 30,7 km .

Full routes and scores are on the maprun portal here .

Thank you for all your feedback and comments and I hope you all enjoyed your ride. I enjoyed planning my first maprun winter event, no longer did I need to find obscure clues although I did leave a post box in for those who read the clues, you simply decide you need a control in that location and place it , this means that when I realised the event was too large I could easily move some of the controls to make it more compact.

I was surprised less of you visited the outlying controls 8 and 22 as I suspect they would have been quicker route between 27 and 21 and got you 5 more points , similarly I think 28 to 11 may  have been faster via 7 as given the recent rain some of the tracks were much slower.  In hindsight I think the urban bits round Harrogate probably favoured the local riders a bit much  although there is no excuse for going down the wrong road at Pannal Ash Roundabout which at least 2 riders did I won’t embarrass them by naming them., but it meant they picked up 15 first.

We had very few problems with Maprun which is good to see, a couple of controls were not picked up but the riders had clearly gone towards them and increasing the search radius from 30m to 60m meant the system recognised them.

Thanks to Bridget for manning the registration for me and Dave Robertson for his excellent web work and e-mail production, and the staff at the pub for their warm welcome.

I hope you all have everything planned for Christmas and New Year and we look forward to hopefully seeing you at our next event on the 22nd January from the Buck in in Thornton Watlass, Steve has already planned an excellent event for you.  This will be followed by a February event near York and a March event in deepest West Yorkshire planned by Tony Thornley.

We are starting to produce a plan of events for the Summer 2022 series  so if you want to have a go at planning all you need to do is find an area, a start venue such as the village hall and get planning , you can use Maprun or SI the choice is yours , please get in contact via the website so we can hopefully have a full year of events, and build on the success that we managed to make from 2021

Best wishes for Christmas & the New Year

Tim