I would like to start the report with a huge thank you to the following; all of you who took on the challenge and spent the weekend with us, our amazing volunteers who worked tirelessly over the weekend to provide another seamless event, my hill team who ventured into the hills to place and collect the controls, Emma and Stuart for another incredibly well-organised event. It was awesome to see everyone with different experience levels take on the challenge; from first-timers to returning faces and Mountain Marathon veterans. I hope I was able to speak to all of you at some point over the weekend, hearing about your challenges, experiences and route selection was amazing and made the courses I had made much more than some circles on a map. We were graced with superb weather again and I am looking into securing similar conditions for next year.

When Emma and Stuart offered me the chance to take on the course planning duties again for this year, I was delighted. I knew the challenge for me would be to create two more courses that could accommodate everyone’s ambitions over the weekend while offering a different puzzle for you if you ran the event in the last 2 years.

Below you can see a selection of the routes taken by some of the teams over the 2 days in both courses, interesting to see the different routes taken by the teams. Minimising the distance and height gain while playing to your team’s strengths is the aim of the game if you are looking to maximise the points you collect.

After last year’s event I had a few points I wanted to improve on and these are as follows:

Scale of the map and the level of detail included in it.
We used a 1:25K OS basemap for this event, feedback on this change was positive and I think the map was much easier to read this year.

More distinct annotation of the start location
It was clearer to see the start on the map this year, I removed the parking and toilets logos from the basemap this time.

How we present the checkpoints on the map to ensure we don’t obscure navigational details

I made sure that control circles were ‘cut’ at the parts where they would obscure marked paths, features or rights of way.

I would like to start the report with a huge thank you to the following; all of you who took on the challenge and spent the weekend with us, our amazing volunteers who worked tirelessly over the weekend to provide another seamless event, my hill team who ventured into the hills to place and collect the controls, Emma and Stuart for another incredibly well-organised event. It was awesome to see everyone with different experience levels take on the challenge; from first-timers to returning faces and Mountain Marathon veterans. I hope I was able to speak to all of you at some point over the weekend, hearing about your challenges, experiences and route selection was amazing and made the courses I had made much more than some circles on a map. We were graced with superb weather again and I am looking into securing similar conditions for next year.

When Emma and Stuart offered me the chance to take on the course planning duties again for this year, I was delighted. I knew the challenge for me would be to create two more courses that could accommodate everyone’s ambitions over the weekend while offering a different puzzle for you if you ran the event in the last 2 years.

In order to do this, I shifted the map area down to Little Langdale and Tarn Hows. There are plenty of idyllic locations and fast, runnable paths to be found and I wanted to give you the option to experience these on Day 1 but I still wanted to offer a navigational aspect to the Saturday route. This is where Loughrigg Fell and the surrounding area of Silver How came into play, with many crisscrossing paths and knolls to obscure the horizon, it’s easy to start heading in the wrong direction in these areas.

As with last year, I aimed for the controls to not only present navigational challenges and route planning puzzles but to also take you to hidden gems or beauty spots such as Tarn Hows waterfall, Slater Bridge, Blindmoss Tarn, Rydal Cave, Pike o’ Stickle and Easdale Tarn to name a few. I hope you found or visited a few new spots while trying to maximise your score over the weekend. Grasmere as always, did not disappoint!

A feature of the event this year was GPS tracking for all competitors as provided by Tim and his team at Legends Tracking. A great tool for safety, data collection and most of all it was enthralling to watch where you all chose to go and how you did so, live from the showground. It also made collecting controls easier for the hill team as we could check when out on the hill if any of you were yet to come through a specific checkpoint.

Below you can see a selection of the routes taken by some of the teams over the 2 days in both courses, interesting to see the different routes taken by the teams. Minimising the distance and height gain while playing to your team’s strengths is the aim of the game if you are looking to maximise the points you collect.

In my opinion the Day 1 course favoured sticking low and heading south to the Tarn Hows and Holme Fell area, where most of the big points were located. As mentioned above, Silver How can be navigationally difficult and slow going, so dodging this area and beelining towards Little Langdale could have worked better for some teams. We had scorching weather on Saturday so the tree-shaded trails and more frequent stream crossings in this area will have provided a nice respite from the heat.

We were informed around 11:30 that control CF, that was placed at Colwith Force, was missing. I went out as soon as possible and replaced this control at 12:20. With the GPS trackers we were able to see which teams visited the control before it was replaced and therefore were able to credit the points as the teams finished. Thank you to the teams that informed us of the missing control, it enabled us to rectify the issue quickly and without frustrating too many more teams.

We had reports of a few teams using a farmer’s track and going through their yard. We quickly placed signage on this track to make it clear that this was not a permissible right of way. I think this was due to a lack of understanding regarding permissible tracks and rights of way when not on open-access land. I will be thinking of how to mitigate similar confusion next year.

After last year’s event I had a few points I wanted to improve on and these are as follows:

Scale of the map and the level of detail included in it.
We used a 1:25K OS basemap for this event, feedback on this change was positive and I think the map was much easier to read this year.

More distinct annotation of the start location
It was clearer to see the start on the map this year, I removed the parking and toilets logos from the basemap this time.

How we present the checkpoints on the map to ensure we don’t obscure navigational details

I made sure that control circles were ‘cut’ at the parts where they would obscure marked paths, features or rights of way.

As my third event as lead planner on the courses, I really enjoyed the challenge of changing up the map areas and finding even more hidden locations, but I have areas to improve on.

As with every OMM event, we review it on completion to see what we can learn and change for next time. Some of these are:

Adding distinct trails that I find onto the maps so everyone can have the same set of data to course plan from
Triple-check the final map file for errors such as control description and control placements
I will look at adding out-of-bounds areas to specific parts of the map where permissible path/track confusion could occur

We always welcome feedback so if you have other points, please send them through to support@theomm.com