Pier to Pub
The dust has almost settled on this years Pier to Pub. I am happy with the way the event went. This year we decided on a number of improvements to the system.Mail confirmation back to competitors. In the past the payment gateway sent a confirmation email, but it was a poor sort of a thing that had no detail. This year I created an entry ticket, as an email. That listed all of the competitors and their details. It was designed to do three things. Act as an entry ticket, and thus a swimmer/runner identification on the day. Provide additional feedback to the helper on the day so that mistakes were not made. Allow the competitor to see what they had entered so that they could make corrections before the day rather than on the day. On the day corrections are bad because it makes trouble-shooting much more intense.
The confirmation appears to have succeeded in all three areas. We had lots of corrections before the event. On the day corrections were noticeably fewer than in previous yeas and mistakes by the helpers were much fewer, though this could have been for other reasons.
The second major improvement was to replace the current bar code and bar code reader as the timing system with an RFID tag. The bar code system is excellent except that it relies on the people doing the scanning being accurate and not missing any swimmers or runners. Inevitably they do miss some. Last year we missed 100 or so swimmers which is unacceptably high.
We chose the RFID system in part because we want to remain a premier event, and all the big events are adopting this system and we chose it because it would improve the accuracy of the results. In a RDID system the runner or swimmer carries a tag, this is read by a timing mat as the runner passes over it.
I carried out the selection process, and with some help from a number of swim clubs, notably Simon Wilson from Portsea I chose a Queensland company called ChampionChip. They have an impressive set of credentials of swims and runs much larger than ours. This was a big decision to make, as timing is the make or break for the event.
Introduction of a tag system caused both committees much angst as they were worried about the removal and return of the tags. As it turned out removal was easy and return was not the issue that was expected. We had roughly 100 not returned. 40 from the swim and 60 from the run. It remains to be seen how many of these we get back after we ask for them.
The third innovation was for the Mountain to Surf. The M2S allows people to enter on the day, unlike the P2P which is all pre-subscribed. The idea was to allow people to use Internet kiosks to do their entry, this way they would see that the Internet was not so scary and hopefully would therefore be encouraged online. It would also get rid of the painful data entry process which is not much fun for anyone who does it. As it turned out the online system was a little under-cooked and the assumptions about time taken were just plain wrong. I had assumed that it would take around 3 minutes an entry where it took more like 7-8. In the end we abandoned the system and returned to previous years paper entry and then data-entry. Claire Dunnin saved the day, without here as the backbone of the data-entry system we would have been stuffed, There was a flow on effect from this decision which was to effect timing quite badly.
The next innovation was to introduce wave starts to the run. The run is through a mountain track, and the congestion on the track is a real issue. By changing to 3 waves we could relieve a lot of that congestion.
We have always had an elite runner process where the fastest started at the front of the pack. What I hadn't thought through was what this meant once there were wave starts. It meant that we created a default open wave, with runners needing to both change their category and start time. I changed only the start time, then discovered that all of the on the day entries had no starting wave. Simple I ran the assign to wave process, that fixed the bulk of the problem by giving all the on the day entries a starting wave, but promptly changed the start time of elite runners. So we had about 30 runners whose start time was wrong by 15 or 30 minutes, the difference in the three waves starting time. This created havoc when getting the results out.
The Mountain to Surf is run on the Friday with the Pier to Pub on the Saturday. We closed off entries around 4:00pm with a record number of entires for the event of 2,228. The finish was great, commentators were able to speak directly about who had finished, their names and places and so on.
It took a long time to finalize the results, mainly cause of the mistakes I had introduced into the system. We finally staggered to a presentation about an hour late and the results were finalized at 8:30. By 9:00pm I was ready for dinner. It had been a long day starting at 7:00am and finishing at 9:00pm.
Saturday I started at 6:00, getting computer systems backed up and photos transferred. First briefings were at 7:00am and I headed off to set up the trouble shooting area at 8:00. Registration kicked off at 9:00am.
Troubleshooting this year was a breeze compare to last year. If there hadn't been a minor glitch with the letter K in one of the registration queues we would have had a very easy day. Registration was over by 12;00.
I had really wanted to examine both the queues for registration and the way the tent worked, but I was the only one in the TS tent that understood the system and so didn't get out much. I want to look at the registration system as I believe that there is much opportunity for improvement of the system.
Another innovation was to package the swimmer strap in an envelope containing all of the details of the swimmer. Hat/TShirt/Statrt wave and so on. This proved very effective. It cut the error rate fully as much as I had hoped and provided good feedback to both the registrars and the trouble-shooters. It needs to do that because the process of packing takes nearly a day to get done.
This year registration seemed to take longer than it had previously done. We closed at 11:00 last year and 12:00 this year.
The swim itself went very well. We were only 30 minutes late for the results for presentations which was a record. This year there was a very nice touch, I was awarded an honorary Shark Bait medal for work on the swim. I was very flattered by this
I want to be ready for presentation at 3:00 ready to go. And I think that after this first year with ChampionChip that can be achieved for next year. I was very impressed with how diligent the CC people where at getting the results right and ensuring that we had no errors. This was borne out with a record low number of complaints, only 20 for both events down from well over 100 last year. Finally I had the results to the news paper the Sunday Herald Sun by 6:00pm Again a bit slow, I would have liked to hit 4:00pm.
The washup. On the day entries via kiosk don't work, instead we need to concentrate on improving the level of pre-entries. Wave starts for the M2S work well, there is some minor tuning to do for next year. The swimmer/runner entry ticket worked very well. Need to extend this system to cover those that entered but did not complete the entry.
The new timing system was a success, with a little bit of a change to procedures we can meet all of the critical time deadlines.
I am a very happy administrator, all the systems did their job and the event ran well.
Created: 1/Jan/2007 - 12:00 AM Last updated: 2/Jan/2007 - 12:00 AM