Patapsco/CCBC - Mar 30, 2014

I did not use a Garmin. Mine was acting up so I left it at home. The Garmins that the club possesses had not arrived on site when I got was ready to begin so I orienteered without one. My stated actual distance is approximate since I used a ruler and the map to guess the actual distance that I traveled.

I won the time derby for the umpteenth time. In other words, I spent more time orienteering than anyone else. The combination of windy, wet weather and low attendance at this event probably are in large part responsible for my win.

Control pickup was no picnic. It was raining when I started and switched over to sleet and then snow before I finished. Most of the controls I had to pickup were in wooded areas which offered some protection from the elements.

More: Attackpoint Training Log

Google Maps: Dave Goes Orienteering 2013-14

Little Bennett - Mar 23, 2013

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My plan when I set out was to find all the controls in a particular area and finish before the 2 hour time limit ended. I wasn't entirely successful. I found most of the controls I wanted to find but in the end I had to give up because it became clear to me that I was going to take me longer than 2 hours if I insisted on finding all the controls I originally wanted to find. Unfortunately I didn't make it back in less than 2 hours and ended up getting docked 160 points because I was almost 4 minutes over.

I made one serious navigational error just before I gave up and started to head back. I was coming from control 140 and wanted to find 141 next. I got mixed up and started heading southwest instead of southeast. I went quite a ways before I realized my mistake.

On the whole I think my strategy was sound. Considering the competition and the course I didn't stand a chance of winning or even breaking into the top 20. I finished 38 out of 51. I could have finished a few places higher if I had gotten to the finish a few minutes earlier and avoided a penalty.

Score-O

(1) 122 - 40 points
(2) 132 - 40 points
(3) 128 - 60 points
(4) 130 - 60 points
(5) 135 - 60 points
(6) 136 - 40 points
(7) 137 - 80 points
(8) 138 - 100 points
(9) 139 - 40 points
(10) 140 - 60 points

Subtotal: 580 points

Time: 2:03:58

Penalty: 160 points

Score = 580 - 160 = 420 points

Distance Traveled: 5.82 miles

Results

Manassas - Mar 17, 2013

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Course: Blue [19 controls; 9.3 km; 210 m]
Time: 2:43:34 - AttackPoint - WinSplits

Actual Distance: 12.46 km / 7.74 miles

 

Oregon Ridge - Dec 16, 2012

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Course: Red [11 controls; 7.2 km; 220m]
Time: 2:04:06 - AttackPoint - WinSplits - RouteGadget
Actual Distance: 8.64 km / 5.37 miles

Patuxent - Nov 4, 2012

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The weather was very nice for the 2012 Mid-Atlantic Orienteering Championship. It was a little too breezy to just stand around without a jacket or hat but it wasn't bitterly cold either.

I ended up volunteering after orienteering even though I had not planned to do so. I teamed up with Dan to pick up controls. I picked up 3, she picked up 7. Mine were a little more spread out than hers were. I also had to lug a couple unopened gallons of water back from the first control I picked up.

Instead of blue I "ran" the red course because it was my age appropriate course. I don't think I was fast enough to have an impact in the scoring. I finished 17th out of the 17 that finished the course.

For the most part I didn't have any trouble with the course. There was lots of up and down, especially in the southern section of the map. For a while, after crossing the road while on my way to 2/115 and until I crossed the road after finding 5/125 I didn't see anyone. It was kind of nice. That wasn't the case in the southern portion of the map. I ran into considerably more people there and often they were looking for the same controls as me, even though most of them were not running the same course as me.

There weren't many SVO participants but SVO is a fairly small club. The DVOA contingent seemed a little on the small side. That probably had something to do with the effects of Hurricane Sandy.


Course: Red [Controls 12; 7.2 km; 270 m]
Time: 2:11:13 - WinSplits - RouteGadget - AttackPoint
Actual Distance: 8.8 km

Swanson Road - Oct 14, 2012

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For the second consecutive year Quantico Orienteering Club had an orienteering meet in the Swanson Road Natural Area. Once again I was the meet director. On the whole I think this year's meet went well. The weather was much nicer and we had a significantly bigger turn out than last year. My biggest task leading up to the meet was recruiting people to help run the event. I wasn't completely successful in getting enough volunteers prior to the day of the meet but luckily some people stepped up at the meet to help out.

I bought more food this year than I did last year. In addition to lots of water, this year I bought 30 apples, 20 oranges, 4 one pound bags of pretzels, and 3 two pound packs of cookies. I was worried early in the day that I might have bought too much but by the end of the afternoon it was all gone.

Missteps

I may have focused a little too heavily on volunteer recruiting and buying supplies for this event. I feel as if I did not give enough time to other things like coordinating with the course designer and making sure I had everything I needed, like course notes. The course designer for the 2011 Swanson Road meet (who also happens to be the club's president) was much more pro-active than the one I was working with this year. Last year we communicated quite a bit in the week leading up to the event. That was not the case this year and I am at least partly to blame for the lack of communication.

Another area where I think I failed was in preparing the bulletin board that goes next to the registration table. It was sorely lacking in information. It should have included a copy of the meet announcement and the course notes. I did not press the course setter for course notes and he did not produce any. I also didn't realize that he wasn't going to be at the event until the night before when I was notified by one of the officers of the club. Still, I should have made a better effort to keep an open line of communication with the course setter, difficult as that might have been considering that he doesn't use e-mail and his only phone is a landline.

At the very least the bulletin board by the registration table should have included that following:
- a list of the courses offered (color, level of difficulty, control count, distance, elevation)
- a warning about areas of the map that need work (to put it politely)
- a warning about giving a wide berth to the Prince George's Radio Control Club's activities

The map

It needs some work. There are areas that are marked in white that aren't as open as the map would lead you to believe. There are also sections of the map, from what I have been told, where the contours are not representative of the actual terrain. If the map isn't updated by the next time it is used then, as indicated above, a warning should be posted for those who will be looking for controls in the areas where the map is known to be inaccurate.


A not so easy white course

The white course, one of the beginner level courses, was more difficult than it should have been. In order to find the 6th, 7th, and 8th controls on that course you needed to follow the telephone lines through some fairly thick undergrowth. I had one of the volunteers go out and place streamers through that section but that was after a number of people had attempted the course. Even with the streamers it still would have been a slog and quite difficult for anyone unfamiliar with orienteering or off-trail hiking.


Control pickup

Because the course designer wasn't at the meet I took care of organizing a group of volunteers for control pickup. I wasn't successful in getting enough volunteers for this task before the meet. One volunteer backed out at the last minute due to an injury he sustained while orienteering. In the end I managed to get five people to help me with control pickup.

After parceling out the controls I left myself with 10 controls to pickup. It took me about 70 minutes to find them all and lug them, plus two gallons of water, back to the start. During that stretch I also collected roughly half of the streamers that one of the volunteers put out for the white course. I didn't get to see all of the park but it was nice to see more than just the area surrounding the start/finish. According to my watch I walked about 2.75 miles.

While picking up controls I tripped over the remains of a barbed wire fence. I fell flat on my face but didn't sustain any injuries. When I got home I found a big tear in one of my shoes that wasn't there before; must have been the wire fence I tripped over. I'm glad I was wearing an old pair of shoes.

End of the day confusion

We had a little bit of drama after I got back from control pickup. We thought that one of the volunteers was still out looking for controls. We came to that conclusion because the control boxes he was supposed to pickup were missing. A couple people drove out to look for him. About ten minutes later we discovered that we had the missing flags but not the control boxes. After a couple phone calls, including one to the search party, we concluded that the missing control boxes must be in a bag that some else took home with them. This was confirmed later in the evening by e-mail.

Link: Swanson Road Results

Meadowood - Sep 30, 2012

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I was supposed to help set up before the o-meet. I arrived 10 minutes later than I was supposed to be there, 50 minutes before the meet was due to begin. There were already 15-20 people there waiting to orienteer in addition to the folks setting up the meet. There wasn't much for me to do at that point so after standing around for a half hour or more I paid my event fee and did a course.

Meadowood has always been a challenge for me, and others. Part of the problem is that the map isn't as good as it could or should be. The club has yet to get the sort of data it needs to update the map. In particular there are trails and contours missing from the map. On most (if not all) of the advanced courses I'm sure that made a difference. I know that I felt it on the blue course.

The first time I had problems that I would attribute to the map was when I was searching for control 4/126. There was at least one re-entrant which I mistook for the entrant that the control was just above. I spent a few minutes searching it before deciding that it must be an unmapped feature. When I did find the control it was because I was following a trail which was mapped.

Control 7/101 seems to have been placed on the wrong root stock. There were two of them marked on the map. The map indicates that it should have been on the northern one but instead it was on the southern one. This gave me a little bit of trouble. I circled around for a little while before I found it with a little help from a couple other people who found it first.

Control 8/109 was not misplaced but I did a poor job when it came to finding it. I got in the general area and then tried cutting cross country instead of following a trail. When I did eventually find it was because I relented and took a trail.

Control 11/115 probably shouldn't have given me as much trouble as it did. I wasn't low enough into the re-entrant when I started looking for it. First I walked southeast along the re-entrant, then I tried heading northwest, and finally southeast again. Each time I got a little closer to the center of the re-entrant and on the third try, just as I was starting to get desperate, I found the control.

Control 13/129 wasn't easy to find. I knew that it was north of the trail I used to get in the general area of the control. What I couldn't figure out was where I should leave the trail and head north. I ended up much further west than I needed to go. When I started to head back east I wasn't sure where I was in relation to the control. I wandered a bit, got lucky and little bit of help from another orienteer.

The map is one of the key tools that orienteers use. When a map is as inaccurate as the Meadowood map is it shakes my confidence in it and my own abilities. There is no backup system for the map. What I end up doing is trying to figure out where the map is accurate. This usually adds to the time it takes me to find controls. Such was the case today.

On the plus side the weather was gorgeous. It was a little warm but not too warm. On the down side the bugs were out in full force and I came home with lots of little bites.

I stuck around after the meet to help clean up. After that I went to dinner with Dan and Jon. We ate at Busboys and Poets in Shirlington. I had hummus; black beans, wild rice, and grilled chicken; and banana bread, white chocolate pudding.

Course: Blue [Controls: 18; 8.8 km; 235 m]
Time: 3:40:46 - WinSplits - RouteGadget - AttackPoint
Actual Distance: 14.01 km

Patuxent - Mar 3, 2012

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Course: Brown [9 controls; 3.6 km; 95 m]
Time: 1:14:33 - WinSplits - RouteGadget

Greenbelt - Feb 12, 2012

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It was cold, cold, cold today at Greenbelt. Winter finally arrived with a vengeance. I spent my first 90 minutes helping out with registration. Due to park regulations we are unable to accept payments in the park. Most people pre-registered. Those that didn’t were directed across the street from the park to the parking lot of Capitol Cadillac. That’s where I and a few other volunteers were stationed. People drove up in their cars and we registered them. It is unclear to me why we couldn’t run this operation from a vehicle. We had to stand out in the cold, and it was bitterly cold.

When I was finally relieved I headed back over to the park. I first used the bathroom where I discovered just how cold my hands were. I didn’t have any gloves. I had been keeping them in my pockets but they were still a bit numb. After using the facilities I got the zipper on my pants up and fastened the buckle but I couldn’t get my pants to snap back up.

Jon offered to loan me a pair of gloves but I turned down his offer. I felt that I could manage without and for the most part I was right. For a while my hands didn’t feel cold at all, but looking back now I have to wonder if they were just numb at the time.

The course itself wasn’t terribly difficult. None of the controls gave me any trouble. I got lucky in a couple cases but for the most part my familiarty with the park, the lack of foliage and the placement of some of the controls meant that I didn’t experience much in the way of frustration.

I think I broke my compass today. Just after finding the 13th control I noticed that there was an air bubble in my compass. I hadn’t noticed it before. I think the casing must have cracked and let that it. I fell a couple times today but didn’t think I landed hard enough to break it. I’ve had that compass for about 6 years, so I feel like I got my money’s worth out of it.

I used a garmin today. I remembered to start it at the right time but I forgot to stop it after I finished. I was about to drive off when I realized that I was still wearing it and that it was still running. It had been about 30 minutes since I finished the course at that point.

On the way home I stopped at REI. I bought a pair of gloves. Maybe I should have bought a second pair: one pair for orienteering and another pair for day-to-day use. I wanted to buy a thumb compass but they didn’t have any. I guess I will need to shop online for one of those. I wore the gloves home even though it was warm enough in my car that I really didn’t need them.

Course: Blue [15 controls; 8.1 km; 230 m]
Time: 2:34:08 - WinSplits - RouteGadget

Lake Needwood - Sep 18, 2011

Course: Red [7.3 km; 228m; 28 controls]
Time: 2:53:55 - winsplits - routegadget


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Little Bennett North - Mar 27, 2011

Course: Green [6.1 km; 200m; 16 controls]
Time: 1:52:56 - winsplits - routegadget


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The weather was perfect: cool, a little breezy, no rain or snow.

I arrived at 12:30. I helped out at the registration table from 1-1:45, after which I walked the green course. I would have preferred to attempt the red course but I was fairly certain that I didn't have enough time to finish it before 4:00.

Overall the course wasn't too difficult. I have orienteered in Little Bennett before but there was very little overlap between the section we used this time and the section used on my previous visits to the park. I probably could have done a better job with route selection, especially towards the end of the course. On the whole I am happy with my performance.

Great Falls, MD - Dec 5, 2010

Course: Intermediate [5.2 km; 175m; 13 controls]
Time: 1:15:22 - winsplits - routegadget

It was cold and windy at Great Falls. I can't remember an orienteering experience at Great Falls that wasn't cold and windy. I'm grateful that there wasn't any snow. Last year there was at least a few inches of snow on the ground.

I spent the first 1.5 hrs at Great Falls volunteering. I helped Heidi with the e-punch. She ran the computer. I taught people (who needed some instructions) how the e-punch works. I got a few technical questions that I was unable to answer. In one case I referred the person to Jon. In the other I just shrugged my shoulders and apologized for not knowing what all symbols were on the clue sheet.

When Heidi let me go it was around 12:20. I had less than 3 hours to complete a course. Based on a number of factors I decided to walk the intermediate course. I would have preferred to try the advanced course but I think it was just a little too long for me to complete in 2.5 hours.

The intermediate course wasn't challenging. I had help with a few of the controls. For the last 7 or 8 controls I was being followed by a FUMA student. He passed me briefly as we approached a couple of the controls and I passed him as I headed off to the next control. With 3 or 4 controls left on the course he met a buddy of his also from FUMA, who also proceeded to follow me. I took it as a compliment that they were following me and didn't try to dissuade them from doing so.

I finished 25th out of 84 people/groups that completed the course. There was a combination of 10 DNFs and MPs. I can't remember the last time I finished that high in the rankings. I didn't finish ahead of anyone that I normally wouldn't have. The intermediate course was a little more difficult than the usual intermediate course. This may have contibuted to some of the slower times.

Between the 13th (and final control) and the finish I got whacked in the (left) eye by a small branch. It didn't hit me. I walked into it. I normally have lots of near misses with branches, big and small. This was the exception to the rule; contact was made. The pain wasn't extreme but it did bother me for the next 36 hours.