Tarmo, I’s say that would make it quite complicated for for both organizers and spectators. And those “fast runners” would still get some advantage by getting rest seconds by being fast.

Terje, the effect of this sprading is the opposite. Courses should became more challenging as whole, that would make it pure orienteering competition that today’s races with lots of easy legs without route choice and taking same controls several times (butterfly loops). Not to mention following.

Finn, that would need a person to hold the map. Ideally method should work unmanned. Using official doing something like that would add risk of human error, like giving back wrong map. I’d say better approach would be just banning watching map and have offical and possibly video camera watching. But it would make it more complicated and we would gain nothing with it, at least if we consider map reading is fair because the advantage is earned in qual race. Think of 200m track running. First lane is not as fast as outer lanes, but race is still considered fair because anyone can earn a fast lane by running fast in semi finals. Same here, we give the best/early map reading advantage to qual winners.

Søren Bobach, stop-and-go spreading is the old idea dead running is based on. Some didn’t like stop and go because this is endurance sport and stopping and resting was seen as bad idea. It also might need officials. It might work unmanned by having clock and two punch units at control, competitors would be responsible to stop and wait at right controls. Anyway, dead runnig is enhanged version of this stop and go idea, I just changed wait&rest with dead runnig section so runners would not get rest and reveal control so easily, and offials would not be needed and map studuing would not be that easy while runniing or at least it would slow dead section runner runner down.

Martin, lots of good thinking. Assigning spreading loops on the fly to competitors would need a person to do it, so that would not work unmanned. I’d say it would be OK solution for champinship races like WOC, but maybe not for WRE races or regular national races. But personally I don’t like the idea of designing some special WOC only solutions.

About Wingsted and Glibow issue, I’d wouldn’t say spreading does not work at all threre. They would get 40 sec apart and can’t see each other any more. So it is possible they take diffrent route choice (or Glibow makes mistake), so Wingsted may pass Glibow without contact. And even if they meet, Glibow’s relative time would be 40 worse that what it would be without the spreading. And later comes second spreading of course.

—

I don’t think anyone can say what is the best aproach without doing testing and using it at real races.

We’ll see later how effective the actual spreading effect, but I believe it will be fine. So the key qustion may be what is the right level of fairness – how extremes we have to go to be able to agree it is fair? Examples:

Level 1: two loops are made as equally fas as organizer could with some test runs. And spreading courses are just randomly assigned to runners (randomizing sperading for the first starter). And that’s it, some will get advantage of reading map early, some late, and some half time at both places, but we simply consider it is fair enough.

Level 2: Organizer make first sprading slightly faster and assign that spreading to qual winners.

Level 3: As level 2, but also banning map reading while dead running.

level 4: Banning map reading and also using same spreading loop twice with setup like this to make loops 100% equal.

The higher level makes it a bit more complicated for organizers and 4th level also has big influence on course layout and makes course less challenging. How extermes we would actually need to go, I don’t know. Race is never not 100% equal, for example running over open area some may have more head wind than others and that can make couple of seconds. If loop inequality is assigned randomly just as wind speed, do we need to go to extremes (level 4) to make the inequality totally dissappear and at same time pay the price of making it impossible for course setter to make the most of the course. For example take al look at Portugal O meeting day 3 course. Is that the desired way of the future to plan long courses? I don’t say course setter did bad job – he did good job but the spreading method simply tied his hands.

When we think what is the proper level of equality we should compare it to ohter old inequality issues we already have (like time loss for pin punching if epunch unit dies, how extreme we do go today with that issue to make it fair enough) and also inequality of other spreading methods. More about equality issues of some about other methods compared to dead running here.

Such a modification would also weaken the argument mentioned in the NOF’s Paper, that such a method would make it hard to the spectators to follow the competition (because all the strong runners directly pass the first dead running with an A)