Yep Sport

Demographics

Here’s an age/gender breakdown of pre-entries from the City Race earlier this month:

It shows a good representation of “Open” class entrants - aged between 21 and 35, with the proportion of males-to-females reasonably balanced. There is the familiar participation dip, followed by the “baby boomer” surge - here, women are much more poorly represented.
This [...]

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Route Variations

Over 100 people posted their route for the City Race to RouteGadget, and looking at the resulting routes reveals some interesting variations in route choices taken.
Here’s some of the “best” legs, in terms of the variation of routes taken, focusing particularly on variations of the top-placed runners.
Six of the top eight runners on the Men’s [...]

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Autumn Schedule

These are the events I’m planning to run in this autumn and beyond.
Of these, I’m looking most forward to the Cambridge City Race.
19 Oct - CompassSport Cup Final, Sutton Colefield
23 Oct pm - SAX Street-O, Sevenoaks
26 Oct -
2 Nov - SO November Classic, New Forest
9 Nov - SOS C4 at Chelmsford?
11 Nov pm - SLOW [...]

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Stats

Some stats for the City Race map:

3896 photos were taken
45 hours of field surveying. No idea how long I spent doing the cartography - many times longer!
742 trees
809 buildings
50 construction sites
116 monuments
1330 barriers
502 underpasses
1278 steps (and these are the generalised steps shown on the map - true figure is probably several thousand.)
45% of the map [...]

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Urban Canyon

The City is extremely built up, with skyscrapers and tower blocks in all directions. This means that a GPS receiver was always going to suffer, with signals bouncing off windows - the so-called “multipath” effect, caused by urban canyoning. I noticed this when carrying out early experiments to see if I could map the City [...]

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How we Secured the City Race Controls

City Race competitors may have noticed the unusual way that the controls were mounted. Controls going walkabouts is always a worry for urban events, and although the City is largely deserted during the weekend (apart from teams of construction workers and window cleaners, it seems) it was still a concern. The biggest worry was uninformed [...]

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Latest from the Arena

Looks like the finishers’ refreshments tent has arrived, fantastic.

Also, listen to BBC Radio London between 8:30pm and 9pm tonight - the organiser will be talking about the race.

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Varsity Clash

There are five Oxford runners and five Cambridge runners on the Men’s Open course at the City Race.
An early varsity test - who will win? Which team will do best?

…and how will both teams do against ULOC?

With all three universities out in force, it could be a revival of the southern rounds of the Churchill [...]

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How many trees in the City Map? (Object counts in Adobe Illustrator CS3)

This is one of the questions that the organiser asked me a few days ago.
Here is a short script, written in Javascript, which, when run from within Illustrator, will count and list the number of occurrences of each type of symbol (or SymbolItem) showing in the visible layers. As a bonus, it also counts the [...]

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The Arena Awaits

Five days to go.

Hopefully it will be a bit drier than it was today.

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