Lake Johnson January 7, 2007

Mihai Ibanescu Event Director

We've been blessed to have a very warm January, and the Sunday of the event was no exception. The day started in the mid 40s and was probably in the mid to upper 60s for the event. (But that's just my guess, staying still in the start booth doesn't make me the best judge of the temperature). At some point after the start it started to drizzle, I only know that because the control cards for people returning from the course were all wet.

We've had a large participation, 86 starts total. The line at start was pretty long in the beginning. Inevitably, we ran out of maps (Yellow and Brown; Yellow, mostly because the White maps were all spread to the people taking the class, and we thought we ran out of them, directing people on the Yellow course instead).

I made several mistakes in setting up the course, which I hope didn't cause too much confusion. In the early morning, while setting up the courses, I swapped two controls, RC and RG, and that caused a bit of confusion for people running on Orange, because they were expecting a different code. Advanced courses were not affected except for having to read them swapped from the master punch card at finish.

Another big mistake was the description that said "middle reentrant" where it should have said "between reentrants"; the confusion probably made people waste some time there, since there were only two reentrants and one control on the spur between them.

There was also a control marked as being in a reentrant, except that it was placed on a root stock (which was not on the map). The control was in the reentrant, but the smaller feature should have been its description.

Runners on the advanced course were challenged with a twist in the regular setup: control codes were obfuscated on the map, and dummy controls were added in order to force the reading of the control descriptions. The feedback I received for this was that it emphasized the orienteering skills over the running skills, and although confusing at first, it was fun. The rules were thoroughly explained in an email sent to the mailing list on Saturday, and a printout of the email was available at the start. I tried my best to have everybody on the advanced courses read it, but there were complains that not everybody is on the mailing list, and I probably missed to mention it to several participants. Also, one runner was confused by one of the obfuscated symbols that was reading ///, thinking that is "middle reentrant".

There were several items found on the course, if you want to claim one please contact Joseph Huberman and describe it.

Thanks to everybody who made this Sunday event a success (minus the problems I mentioned above, and others that I probably missed). In no particular order, Joseph Huberman and Ruth Bromer helped with designing the course and caught some rookie mistakes I did, and printed the maps. Artem Kazantsev manned the start/finish table and picked up controls, along with Michael Madigan and David Seibert, and Joseph also taught the class.

Mihai Ibanescu