Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Down to the bridge and back through the Lane property, In The (morning) Dim. Wore a headlamp, but didn't need it to see where I was going, just had it on when I was on Northfield and Gilchrist to make myself a little more conspicuous. I was smart enough to wear spikes, and the trail was in fact much more treacherous ice than I had encountered last night. Not much of a run, but I had to get something done in the morning and get to work early so I can bug out in the afternoon and catch a plane.

WBW, In The Dark. Pearl Hill campground loop, once CCW and once CW. I envisioned this as a pavement run, but although things are pretty well melted out down south in Lunenburg, up north in the wilds of Townsend there's still an inch or so of white stuff left, which was compressed down to ice in a lot of places. I would have been much better off with spikes; I had a few slips but no falls. Temperature in the mid 20s F, I dressed pretty warmly, but took off my gloves about 2/3 of the way around.

I think I may have noticed this before, but it's pretty clear that Google Maps has a pretty glaring error in terms of the location of this road down at the SE part.

A quick jaunt, In The Dark. Down to the bridge, plus a brief excursion onto the trail toward the Peabody, which was rather icy.

In The (early) Dim. Managed to get out and put this one in the books because I don't see a good chance to do it later.

In The Dark. I have a feeling that it's going to be a thin week...

Borderland State Park, with Nancy. About 30 years ago, I was looking at possible places for NEOC to map, and this looked like a possibility. I brought it up, and Barry Callahan said he'd been there it was way too thick. We went for a hike today, in mid-winter, and it seemed not too bad. Topography pretty interesting, overall very little relief but lots of features one or two contours high. Quite a lot of mappable boulders, some very large, and stony underfoot in places. Seemed like a fairly dense trail network. The woods were not incredibly open, but the offending vegetation looked to be about knee-high and not thorny, so visibility was pretty good. We certainly have areas with worse green, some of which are considered to be good maps. Pretty good size parking lot, but even on a day in late January, it was full (popular with mountain bikers and disc golfers, as well as casual hikers). But it looks like there re some fields within the park property that could maybe be used for parking. I'd say it has potential, though not a real priority -- it's not like our other maps in that part of the state get a lot of use.

Sailing on Winnepesaukee, from Ellacoya Park. I failed to see the parking lot that the iceboaters were using, so I parked on the side of the road and walked in through the snow. Not a big surprise when I got to the ice and saw a bunch of them sitting by the shore (I think they've been camped out there for a couple of days) and one out on the lake.

This was basically 100% sailing. Breeze was light, ice wasn't bad, though there were areas to avoid. One section consisted of snow that had drifted into sastrugas, then gotten saturated, then frozen. Very rattling when going perpendicular to the ridges, so I got out of there. There was also a section that was beautiful black ice, nice enough to make you nervous that it might be thin. Looked adequate to hold me up, and I was maybe a little extra cavalier because I was wearing a PFD (why not?).

There was a group of people with skates and poles who were going out for a tour, and I chatted with one of them briefly. I considered putting the sail away and tagging along, but decided to keep sailing. The SE excursion was when I decided to pursue them for a while, and the ice down that way was very nice. I was gaining on them, but then the ice felt like it was starting to get soft, so I turned around and headed in so I wouldn't get stuck.

First time ever on the ice on Winnepesaukee, about 65 minutes (the rest was walking to and from the car, putting on my skates, etc.). It's a big lake, I covered only a tiny portion of it. Top speed apppears to be the same as last time, 18.8 mph. I sharpened my antique skates myself for the first time last night, using the antique tools that I inherited from my father (fortunately, there are web pages explaining how). This sailing isn't much exercise, but it is tiring on the arms eventually. And can be cold for the fingers.

Ohana Family Camp, 60-minute score-O with Dad's snowshoes, 2.76 km straight line by the control order that I took (31 33 32 45 40 39 38 37 52 41 34 43 35 44 42 49 51 48 47 53 46 50 54). I think that's all of them, unless there was a 36 out there that I can't find on my map. I couple of the control order choices were not the best (should have gotten 31 later, and 50 earlier). The only places where I lost some time were on the way out of the start triangle (duh); on the way to 38, when I paused, looking for a nonexistent control (it wasn't a purple circle, it was a roundish contour in an open area that was about the right size); and 48, where I was standing right next to the control for a few seconds but looking the wrong way. #32 was misplaced, but didnt cost me any time since it was really visible. I took the snowshoes off to go on the road from 40 to 39, don't know if that saved me any time or not. Took straight lines where possible, including crossing the swamp on the way to and from 41.

First time orienteering on January 25.

Second fastest to get them all (Carl Childs was faster with I believe just regular shoes).
meaningless splits

Holman Street out and back, In The Dark. Ihad plans to do something different, skating at Delaney. If I had gone before work, that likely would have been fine. But I waited until after work, and the temperature had gotten up into the mid 40s F during the day. The ice was plenty thick (I gave up on trying to chop through when I got down 10 cm or so), but the warm day had softened up the top cm or so, and the skate blades sank into it. My GPS watch had gone dead anyway. So I gave up after about a minute, came home and grabbed my other watch, and went for a run instead.

I recently started a blog about my father's artwork, of which I'll be trying to post an installment once a week. Feel free to stop by, or you can subscribe if you want to have it come to you.

The letter carrier misread the house number 871 as 371, so I received somebody else's W2. I delivered it, In The Dark. Heard a pack of coyotes howling somewhere near Lanni Orchards on my way back.

C • Misdelivery 2

Robbs Hill, In The Dark. Parked on Burrage St., and the majority of this was snowmobile trails, with some snow bike trails and some trails with just a little foot traffic. Navigated strictly by topology, which worked out fine. Temp a few degrees below freezing. Nice night, nice place, hadn't been there in a long time.

Down the bank of the Nashua River from 225 and back, In The Dark. Turned around at the private property sign. A few inches of snow, some of which was packed by snowshoes and some of which wasn't. A little slow going when I cut through the woods to get back to the trail. Temperature in the high teens F.

Willard Brook NW. I could have sworn that I had more than one pair of XC skis, but maybe when we had the dumpster to clean out Mom's house, I tossed the others because I decided they were junk. Well, the pair I have left are junk, too. Maybe the skis are barely okay, but the boots and bindings are definitely junk. (The poles, however, are quite good.) So this barely qualified as skiing, but since there was snow out there, and not enough to justify snowshoes in my opinion, it seemed like the thing to do.

The snow was crusty in the open but softer in the woods, and the first trail I was on had a lot of running water. The bigger trails had had a snowmobile or two go through, but it wasn't packed down enough to skate. On the way back I decided to take a small trail that I remembered, in hope of bypassing a bit of climb and some of the wet sections, but I forgot that it was going to dump me out in the back yard of one of the houses on Vinton Pond, so it ended up doing neither, and I went through a bunch of woods.

Nice to be outside, though.

Snow dealings, round 5a: Alan's driveway. We spent the night at my brother's place, and he has a guy who plows, but I spent a couple of minutes cleaning up the edges and corners.

Snow dealings, round 5b: Nancy's driveway. We parked at North Street Auto and walked down from there, and there was 3-4" of snow. I shoveled a path up to the top, and then this stuff was to the liking of the electric blower, so it did the bulk of the work, and I just needed to do the plow snow down by the road with the shovel, while Nancy cleaned off her car and did the top part.

Snow dealings, round 5b: my driveway. Parked by the mailbox with the flashers on and blowed a wide enough corridor to get the car in, then blowed the rest, including the mailbox (which was challenging because it got muddy right in front of it, then a tire track/rut/ridge formed and froze, so it's a bad surface under the snow). Pleased that I had enough gas left to get this done. I didn't measure it, probably about the same 3-4" as at Nancy's, which was presumably more before it warmed up today, but it was still pretty fluffy.

Down to the lake and back, In The (morning) Dim, 10F. I wore a headlamp, not because it was hard at all to see where I was going, but just to make myself visible in case I encountered any cars. Stepped out onto the ice, which was nice and smooth enough in the cove, but looked like it had more rough snow coverage further out. But the ice next to shore was too thin, and I went through.

The area on the left going down the hill, where a bunch of clearing took place last year, now has four houses in various states of completion.

12 F, In The Dark.

Well, this was bordering on not so smart.

The ride went fine, but it was pretty cold. It was the loop I had in mind a couple of nights ago. Too cold for riding a bike on the road, at least for me. I was dressed pretty warm, but my fingers, toes, and thighs got cold. My toes are still cold. Uphill wasn't too bad, but the flats and especially the downhills took too little effort and produced too much wind chill. Got it in the books, but that's about all I can say for it. And I suppose I HTFU a little.

A little jaunt near Nancy's house, In The Dark. It wasn't much, but it wasn't nothing. Kind of cold out, though certainly not bad for the middle of January.

(Well, that GPS track certainly isn't very impressive in terms of accuracy!)

Tooling around the neighborhood, In The Dark. I had a different loop in mind, but I lost interest in that within a minute of leaving the driveway. So instead I dreamed up something more modest, but that kept morphing as I went along. Took a lot of mental effort to get myself out the door, but it was fairly pleasant once I did. I expect there will be days that are a lot less appealing before the winter is over. The candlepower I'm carrying is enough that the few cars that I encountered gave me a very wide berth. Had to get off the bike at the Holman bridge because the snow piles haven't melted out. I felt a little bad about all the lights at that point because there was a car parked down there that I suspect was occupied and I hope I didn't disturb anyone.

To the post office and back. In The Dark.

Didn't want to risk stressing the toe, so I bundled up and loaded the Mamacita with a whole bunch of lights and reflectors, and headed out In The Dark. I dreamed up a loop that minimized my time on numbered highways. Temperature maybe just below freezing, with a light fog that tended to reflect the headlamp beam back at me.

Huntington winter training, Red, starting and ending at #3. Another nice warm day, this time with brilliant sunshine. I had to slow down quite a bit in deference to my toe. Good news was that my ankles held up okay, just one roll on the right and that was minor. Bad news is that the toe was not okay at all. I smashed it or caught it a few more times, every one of them painful. I was concerned that I was doing more harm to myself than good. I also started wondering about my shoes, and when I was done, I took the shoelaces out to remind me not to wear them any more, they're going in the poubelle. When they were new, I think they were fine, but they seem to have lost some of the structural properties that I look for in footwear to use in unpredictable rocky forests. I really don't want a shoe that can do this:


splits
RouteGadget

C • splits protocol 5

C • I've been wondering what th... 7

And finally...
J-J's Eleven (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #12

Mt. Norwottuck, Massachusetts, 4/29/1990 (Billygoat)
My first Billygoat was in 1984, and I went overtime. The next year, I succeeded in getting a shirt, and I was pretty pleased about that. There was already a custom of using the initials of the previous year's top placewinners as control codes, and I wondered aloud if I might ever be good enough to get my initials on a control. Dave Bailey thought about that, and said that if the course were ever in a place with a lot of trails, that could require a lot of controls, and the results list would need to be mined more deeply, so maybe it would be possible.
The next year I went overtime again, then I got another shirt, then I missed 1988 because I was in Greece. I did a lot more orienteering when I got back, and got quite a bit better, so the following spring, when the Billygoat was at Mt. Norwottuck, I managed to pull off a 15th place, good enough to earn one point on the lifetime points list, as well as a likely control the following year.
1990 saw the event return to Norwottuck, back-to-back Billygoats, and PG decided to introduce a couple of twists, in order to reduce the following a bit. The first was that everybody was allowed to skip a control. The second was that one control would be forked, and you chould choose to go to either of the locations (or you could skip the forked control). Nobody had any experience with this, so nobody knew how it would work out. Mikell Platt initially thought that it would be a bust, that everybody would just wait and skip the last control.
For the first few controls, I was just in the pack. I made small errors on #3 and #4, I think because everyone else was, and maybe I figured out the errors sooner than most. During this time, I was thinking about the whole skip thing. The obvious choices appeared to be #7 or #8, because the course made acute angles at those controls, so there was a lot of distance to be saved. Skipping #7 also meant a trail run from #6 to #8, and skipping #8 meant a trail run from #7 to #9. But #7 was a water stop, so that was a less appealing choice. And in fact exactly half of the finshers skipped one or the other of those two controls.
But I was among those who looked further ahead. The leg to #12 was a nasty sidehill along the gully-riddled south face of Norwottuck, and then to the forked #13 you had your choice of either more of the same, or a steep climb to the summit of the mountain. However, by skipping #12 and going to the #13 at the top, the climb became a gradual one along the ridge trail. That was the choice that I made.
When I got to the water stop at #7, ten people had been through ahead of me, probably at least five were ahead of me who skipped it, and a bunch more came through soon after me but then skipped #8, so they got ahead of me as well. I had sent a 16 oz. bottle of my preferred sports drink to the water stop, which was manned by Peter and Gail. When I arrived, I quickly punched, grabbed my bottle, and slammed it all down without taking a breath, which earned me an astonished "Whoa!" from Peter. And I took off toward #8 without further hesitation. I was the second one to do that, after Steve Tall 2.5 minutes earlier. I made pretty damn good time over the next four legs, and when we got to the next water stop at #11, there were 19 people ahead of me (some were still at the water stop), but 18 of them had already skipped and had to face the nasty traverse to #12. I had cut a minute off of Steve Tall's lead.
I parted ways with the pack pretty soon as I headed for the summit. Along the summit trail I passed Steve, and continued charging up the trail, no navigation needed. The control description was "hill, western part", and I think it was hanging from the lookout tower. The event had been billed as part of the "Quad State Games", due to the four-state view from one of the control locations. I didn't have time to enjoy the scenery, but there wasn't any, because the summit was socked in with fog.
The drawback to the summit control was that you had to figure out how to get down from there. The next control was to the NW, and that face of the mountain is hellaciously steep and rocky. So I literally put my map and compass in my pocket and charged headlong down that slope, grabbing trees with each hand as I went by them to control my plunge. I made it to the trail at the base of the slope, turned left, started running hard, and did a total face plant.
I got up and started running again, and as I approached #14, I saw two figures up ahead at the control, who I recognized as Joe Brautigam and Rich Kelly. Pretty good company to be in near the end of a Billygoat. With the two of them to follow, I ran hard, and started closing the gap. At #15 (which had my initials, yay!), I had almost caught them. Then Joe headed off in some weird direction, and disappeared, losing a minute. Rich headed the correct way and I charged after him, getting closer by #16 and to within a couple of steps at the final #17. I punched as quickly as I could, and the finish chute was so short that the finish wasn't even shown on the map, no more than 50 meters. I went into an explosive sprint, and Rich responded by... cramping. So I blew past him.
I was by no means the first to arrive. Mikell Platt, Bill Spencer, and Dave Pruden had run most of the course together and had been back for about 15 minutes, and Paul Bennett was 10 minutes behind them. But I was fifth. To date, 97 people have ever finished in the top five in the Billygoat, and I'm one of them.

Blue Mountain winter training, Red, In The Dim, basically. We got there a bit after 3 PM, at which point it was clouding up, but the temperature was just under 70 F! Three or four mistakes of note, the first being that I was headed toward #9/#15 instead of #2, and got almost all the way there before realizing it (there were so many lines coming out of that control that it seemed like you needed to go there from everywhere). On #4 I was too high and to the right and fumbled around there for a while trying to get solid identification on some feature. My route to #10 could have been better. And on #12 I got fairly close, but then wasn't sure where I was, so I went uphill a bit until I got locked in, then continued. The problem was that clouds had come in, making the late afternoon light pretty weak, and I was using the 1:10000 version of the map. It was around this time that it just got too dim for that kind of foolishness, and it became increasingly challenging. It was a good thing that the forest is predominantly hardwood or there would have been no hope. I considered bailing, or maybe going back to the car for my headlamp, but I soldiered on, picking routes that I could make out with limited visibility, like on the end of #16 where the strip of white that I was following was the only thing I could see. And the stone wall was the only thing that allowed me to make it to #17.

Rolled each ankle once (not too bad), but I also smashed my right big toe pretty hard, and that's more of a problem, it's noticeably swollen

I tend to think of Blue Mountain as an uninteresting place, except when I go there and am reminded of how excellent it is.

splits
RouteGadget (I'm the anonymous one)

J-J's TenEleven (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #11

You probably thought this was the last installment, didn't you? But if so, then you failed to realize that J-J can't count! So there's this one, about a race that I did not actually run, and then tomorrow will be the conclusion.

This is about a race that PG wrote about as being his best, and mine is a very different tale. It's mostly backstory, in fact, possibly (tl;dr) and if you want you can scroll down to the last paragraph and the map. It was 22 years ago, and I've related the story enough times that it has probably gotten corrupted in my memory, but at least by putting it down in words now I can keep it from deteriorating any more. I'd say it's at least mostly accurate.

Franzen, Minnesota, 10/12/1997 (Veterans World Cup Final)
I was heavily involved with the organization of WOC93, and was very much aware of how much of a toll it took on USOF. So when word came down that we were looking at putting on another big meet in 1997, the Veterans World Cup (which in later years became the World Masters Orienteering Championships), I was against it. I even wrote a letter to the head organizer, Sherri Litasi, explaining why it would be best to back out of it while it was still early enough in the planning stages, but the event went ahead. Because I was opposed to it being held, I resolved to stay away from the event, neither competing nor helping, even though at age 36 I would have been eligible to participate.
But my clubmate Beatrice (Garzoni)(Zurcher)McBride was interested in going, and thus so was her husband at the time, Bob McBride. Bob was looking to drive to the event (from Colorado, where I was living at the time) and wanted company on the road, as Beatrice needed to fly in shortly before the event. There was a regular A-meet scheduled for the weekend before in the MSP area, then the VWC itself was somewhere in the boondocks near Lake Wobegon, and it was going to have regular “public” courses in addition to the VWC. I was willing to do that, so I joined Bob and we hit the road in my Corolla station wagon.
The A-meet was okay, though a bit disorganized, and my notes from the time say that the courses were very disappointing, much too boring and easy. One thing that it featured was a results system that had been devised by Angus Bond for the VWC, and this meet was its shakedown run. That appeared to be a complete failure. Although I have notes that I finished 15th each day, as far as I’m aware there were never any results published for the meet. In fact, when I arrived at Camp Ripley a few days later, the meet organization appeared to have gone into a panic. They had appealed to Mike Fritz to take over and come up with something that would work, which he did, but as a failsafe, he reached out to me. I had been handling results at the 1000-Day for five years at that point (with substantial help from Charlie DeWeese), and Mike got in touch with me to find out if he could get our system if needed. To do this, he called Mike Minium’s cell phone, and someone brought it to me – this was the first time I ever received a cell phone call. Our system was written in Lotus 1-2-3 (a spreadsheet that had at one time been dominant until Excel took over), and although in the end Mike didn’t need it, he at least had that option in his back pocket.
But before we even left the A-meet, a critical event occurred. Event Director Sherri Litasi came up to Bob and me and asked if we could do her a favor. I skeptically asked what it was. She said it was just a little thing, kind of a thankless job, but she needed somebody who could do some math. It seemed there were water stops for the VWC located at road crossings, and she needed somebody who could get the information from the course setters about how many people would be going to each stop, convert that to the number of gallons required, and drop off that many gallons at each stop.
Well, okay. We figured that wasn’t too bad, though it turned out to be one of the most misleading things anyone had ever said to me.
Tracking down the course setters wasn’t too bad, and they had their acts together and knew how much water was needed. Somebody noted that the meet had rented a few trucks for moving equipment around, and I could probably manage to use one of those – it was a big enough event that I wouldn’t be able to carry all the water in my Toyota. But when I asked Sherri where the water was, she said, well, you could try WalMart, or supermarkets…
Ack! Nobody had actually procured any water for this event!
Although I had been determined to not get roped into helping out at this ill-advised event, it was clear that there was a major gap here that wasn’t going to get dealt with unless I dealt with it. So I started out by stealing a truck. I asked around to find out who had the keys, asked to borrow them for a few minutes, and disappeared for several days with the biggest truck that the meet had rented. Bob needed to pick up Beatrice at the airport, so he took my car, and I went off to do what I’ve exaggeratedly described as driving all over central Minnesota buying all the bottled water available. In truth I think it was only four stores, but I bought all the water they would sell me, not just what was on the shelves but also as much as they’d pull out of the back. And a lot of paper cups. I eventually racked up over $1000 in credit card charges.
I needed help to put the water out, and Bob wasn’t available so I pulled up to the bus stop. There was shuttle service running to the model event, and Gale Teschendorf was sitting there waiting for the bus. I asked him if he wanted a ride, and said hop in, I’d give him a lift if he’d help me move a couple of things. Gale never did make it to the model event.
The water stops were supposedly at “road crossings”. That was a reasonable description for some of the spots, and Gale and I dropped off the water with no trouble. But some of these “roads” were jeep trails. I was warned that there were puddles on some of them, but that Peter Andersen, who had been doing a lot of work on meet setup, had determined that you could get through them okay as long as you had enough momentum. So when Gale and I were heading up one jeep trail and I saw a puddle, I stepped on the gas to just bomb on through. That did not work. I should have known better than to try to emulate Peter Andersen, because he’s crazy.
It had been fine on the smaller puddles, but on this larger one, I bogged down. I had Gale get out of the truck to see which one of the rear wheels was spinning, and he came back and said they both were. Oh, that was very bad news. This truck had a lift mechanism to get heavy items into the back, and the lift structure was hung up on the solid ground behind the puddle, so the rear wheels were just dangling in the water, with zero traction. I was an idiot, and we were cooked.
There was more work that needed to be done in terms of this water job than putting out gallon jugs. Sherri had also asked me to coordinate with the Army on the placement of some water buffalos (water tanks on wheels). I had an appointment to meet the soldiers assigned to that duty, and now I had no transportation. I left Gale with the truck, told him to see if he could come up with any ideas, and went off on foot for my rendezvous. I had decided that the water buffalos would be most useful at the start and finish areas, so I went with the soldiers to tow them around. At some point during this, I ran into some of the other meet crew (Judy Dickinson among them), told them where the truck was, and they went off to try and help Gale. And I described my plight to the soldiers, who couldn’t help me themselves, but referred me to their sergeant.
The sergeant turned out to be incredibly helpful. I got in touch with him, and we drove out to the truck in his jeep. This was a routine situation for him, he said some private would get stuck like this about once a week, so he kept a tow rope in the jeep. He was able to pull us backward and free the truck from the puddle. At this point, the water stops I had been trying to drive to had been supplied with water by people carrying the jugs the rest of the way, so we just needed to get the truck out. Once we were out of the puddle, John Harbuck, who had arrived in his tiny pickup truck, pulled out a chainsaw and tried clearing enough saplings to make a turnaround for the truck, but that didn’t work. We had to back the truck out. Judy was much more experienced at driving trucks than I was, so she took the wheel, and we made it partway, but then we came to the big downhill, and we had a problem. The truck had an automatic transmission, a foot-activated parking brake, and the ground was covered with slippery wet leaves. The only way to slow it down was with the regular brakes, and whenever you touched them, the front wheels would lock up and slide, and you’d lose steering control. Judy considered the situation, and wasn’t comfortable about it. The hill was fairly straight, but a bit tilted to the left. The only thing she could think to do was to just let it roll, stay off the brakes, pray, and try to keep it on the road and upright. I’m really glad she was driving, because I probably would have run off the trail and tipped the truck over on its side.
That didn’t conclude the water responsibilities for the day, I still had to drive back to Brainard to buy more water.
The sergeant turned out to be critical again a couple of days later, when he drove me to another of the water stops. We loaded the water in the back of his jeep, and went for a very wild ride. Road crossings my ass, there was no way that any normal road vehicle could have driven to that spot, the “road” was just a bulldozed ride through the woods, with some pretty steep spots.
I had been planning to sleep in my car, but Nancy was at the meet, helping out at the finish I think, and she had little baby Stephen with her. She had a room in one of the buildings on the base, and she offered to let me crash on the floor, which I accepted.
The next day was the opening of the VWC. I wasn’t running in the VWC itself, I was running M21A in the public event, but that used the same courses as VWC M35 for the two qualifying days. The difference was that there were no public courses on the final day. In the morning I put out more water, for the following day, with the assistance of Mark Parsons, then babysat Stephen for a while, and went out on my course very late. At this point I was exhausted, both physically and mentally. I was in enough of a fog that I was unable to recall my routes on a couple of the early legs, though the splits were okay, so I apparently didn’t have much trouble. But leaving #6, disaster struck. I mistakenly thought I was leaving #7, heading NW toward #8, and everything made sense insofar as I quickly plunged into the green. And I wandered in that green for a long time. Instead of going 400 m north through white woods to get to #7, I finally relocated over a kilometer away on a major dirt road, figured out what had happened, and had to go back though that green to get to #7, where I still had trouble. I finally got it when I stumbled across an easily recognizable feature: the puddle where the truck had been mired. My split for that leg was over an hour. Back through the green to actually get to #8, and the rest of the course went okay. About 10.5 km, and I was just over three hours.
Qualifier Day 2 saw me picking up water stops from the previous days before I ran, and I was still exhausted. Two errors of note, but not on the scale of the one the previous day, and otherwise quite clean. The course was a little longer, but I got around it more than 45 minutes faster. After my run, there was more water work, this time with Bob and Beatrice helping, and that went okay until it came time to leave, and the gate was locked. We were trapped in the woods.
The VWC was held on three maps all at Camp Ripley, an army base in central Minnesota. The maps were in the northern part of the military reservation, and the meet headquarters was on the base proper, at the southern end. Military reservations are locked up most of the time, and the meet organization had failed to come up with a plan to determine when all of the meet workers were out before locking up. Or at least, the water crew was not part of that plan. Fortunately, from my travels on the first day, I knew my way back to the base through the range (as opposed to around on public roads, which is what everyone was doing, a 25+ mile drive). So we drove the lonely dirt roads of the range until we got to the Range Control gate at the north and of the base. I left Bob and Beatrice in the truck and walked about two miles to find somebody to let us in. When we got back, B&B had company, there was a private who had showed up who had also gotten himself locked in.
We had all the water for the last day set up at that point (or close enough, I think there might have been a little more work that I managed to delegate), and there was a rest day before the final. Nancy suggested that we just get the hell out of there, and that sounded good to me. I spent the day as a passenger in her car as we drove up past Duluth, because she wanted to visit a couple of lighthouses, including the famous and spectacular Split Rock. That was the first time that we went to a lighthouse together.
The Final day had no course for me. I was surprised to find that, despite my horrible result the first day, if I had had been running those courses as M35 instead of M21, I actually would have qualified for the A final. I did show up at the event site, where Sherri spotted me, and asked if I could do her a favor.
What now?
Well, she said, there were a few boxes of meet merchandise that inadvertently got left behind at the base, and there wasn’t going to be any opportunity to sell them after today, so we needed to have them up at the event site. Annoying as it was, it was true, so I grudgingly said I’d make the 50+ mile round trip to get them. Just a few boxes, she said. I stole a truck again, and I had to stop to get gas for it on the way. When I got to the base and found the loading dock where the merchandise was, there were dozens and dozens of boxes, and had to load them all myself. Sherri had said that for helping out, I could help myself to a T-shirt or something – yeah, I took more than a T-shirt. When I got back to the event site, I drove the truck right out into the middle of the assembly area where it was completely in the way, tossed the damn keys on the dashboard, left the door open, and walked away.
And I went to my car and got a compass.
When I got to the start, things were wrapping up. I knew the start crew people, and I said to them, I’m not here, but I’m taking this map, and they said, sounds good, have a nice time, J-J. And with an M35 VWC map in my hand, I started my watch.
PG has noted that sometimes he’s had very good runs when he was pissed off for some reason, it helps with the motivation and drive. I was thoroughly pissed off, somewhat more well-rested than I had been on the previous two days, and had zero pressure on me. They had saved the nicest piece of terrain for the final, and I ran that course fast. Small errors on #9, #18, and #19, but I corrected quickly on all of them and didn’t lose too much time. I came tearing up the chute, with most of the people gone by that point, and Lex Bundschuh was working the finish. I stopped a step short of the line, hit my watch, said Hi Lex, I’m not here, and walked off to the side.
12 km, and I got around it in 1:53:49, which would have been good enough for 43rd place at this major event. The best race I never ran.

Crane Beach Full Moon Hike with Nancy (and about 20 other people). A fair bit of standing still and hearing information that we had mostly heard on the previous one of these. Fairly warm evening (around 50F I think), but unfortunately the moon didn't come out from behind the clouds until after we had left.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #10

Happy Valley WMA, New York, 7/31/2011 (US Championships)
I started out running Red M21B at A-meets in 1986. Once I moved up to Blue at the last A-meet of the year in 1988, I stayed on Blue until I was past age 40, and then started running Red at meets where I was also working finish/results, because it got to be too much for one day. Eventually I migrated to mostly Red, running M40 and then M45, but after I turned 50 I thought about it, and decided that these five year age categories make no sense, and we should all be running M35, so that’s what I’ve been doing since. And there was the one exception that I wrote about last week when I ran Brown ecause I was sick.
But the year I was turning 50, I decided to give Green one shot at the US (Two-Day) Champs. Due to my autumn birthday, I wasn’t even actually 50 yet, so it was the ideal time to try. As it turns out, I succeeded, with no help from my awful Saturday run, but a pretty good result on Sunday. (Behind only PG, by four minutes, and at the time he was already ten years older than I am now.)
Since this was in the Attackpoint era, I wrote it up and you can read about it here.

Across the street, In The... Moonlight. I only turned on the headlamp when I was on the road, it was bright enough in the woods to not need it, though sometimes under the evergreens it was hard to see my footing. Almost all hard frozen snowmobile/ATV tracks, and I took one fall. Coldest run so fa this year, I think, but still probably in the upper 20s F. In the interest of not repeating loops as long as I can, I picked this as a short but not that interesting route, although it turned out longer than I expected.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #9

Vasquez Rocks, California, 12/9/2001 (US Relay Championships)
I had gotten a preview map of this park, one of the old versions, and it looked pretty awful (I was later told that it was a very old version, rather than the previous version). But Day 2 was the US Relay Champs, and Mikell was interested in fielding an RMOC team (we had won in 1997 and 1998). I had gone to San Diego for a meet the previous weekend, and rather than stay out there for the week in between, I came home to Massachusetts and went back to LA a week later, traveling with Nancy, Deb Humiston, and Bob Lux.
On Day 1 (individual race), we got a pleasant surprise. The new map, fieldchecked by Clare Durand, looked nothing like the old one that I had gotten in the mail, and it was excellent. The terrain was also extremely gnarly. Very, very difficult stuff. The kind of place where a wrong move could leave you unexpectedly trapped above or below a cliff.
Our relay team was Neal Barlow, Orlyn Skrien, myself, and Mikell. I don’t remember exactly what position we were in when Orlyn tagged off to me, but I think it was pretty close to the front, maybe third or so. I don’t remember the early part of the course very well, but I was with Jan Urban, from the Cascade team. And later Mark Voit caught up.
What I’m pretty sure I do remember is making a small mistake around #10, and thinking that Mark and/or Jan had gotten ahead of me, then pushing as hard as I could to the finish. I didn’t think that I had lost too much time, and when I tagged off to Mikell, I specifically remember saying, Get him!
See my thoughts at the time.
It turned out that I was mistaken. Mark and Jan were actually behind me, but I didn’t realize that the BAOC team was out in front. But Mikell knew that, and he was hunting down Wyatt. There was a story at the end of the anchor leg, I don’t remember the details, but when Mikell popped out into the field, he didn’t realize that he had taken the lead until Neal, Orlyn and I joined him to run down the chute.


It was our third and final RMOC relay victory. As I started writing this up, I remembered (incorrectly) that it was the only time I ever appeared on the cover of O/NA, but that was actually our 1998 victory, where my smiling face… almost appeared…

Oak Hill/Tophet Chasm, In The Dark. Another place where I used to run a lot 15 years ago. Chilly, but I was dressed appropriately. Footing mostly icy. Missed the turn to get back to the car, so when things started looking familiar, I crossed a frozen marsh to get back to the road.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #8

Lake Lanier, Georgia, 8/8/2001 (US Canoe-O Championships)
Aims Coney and I were the dominant team in canoe-O for a while. Neither of us was a top-notch orienteer, and we were mediocre at best as paddlers (in the few canoe races that we entered, our results were awful), but we were better navigators than any real canoe racers, and better in the boat than the rest of the orienteers. Aims was also big on strategy, particularly when to get out of the boat and maybe portage it. And we trained for canoe-O, pretty hard. We’d get together one morning a week to practice paddling, turning, getting in and out of the boat efficiently, portaging, etc.
Aims had participated in the US Canoe-O Champs (put on by the USCA, not USOF) a number of times before, both as a solo and with a partner, and had done well. The first one that we did together was in Georgia, at the venue where the canoe events had been held at the 1996 Olympics. We flew down rather than driving, so although we brought our own paddles, we had to arrange to borrow a boat. There was a We-no-nah AR available, which was not all that different from Aims’s race boat, but it wasn’t set up for specific orienteering use like his, so we had to make some modifications like adding a temporary center seat and a way to attach our map holders. It was also a challenge to get the boat trimmed properly, because I’m a lot lighter than he is, and this didn’t have the custom mods to allow us to put the heavier paddler in the rear seat. But we managed.
Canoe-O is a little different from regular orienteering in terms of being able to preview the terrain, since most of the other competitors had been training and racing on the lake for at least a few days. We didn’t have that advantage, but we did know where the event center was, and we looked at where the course might go. Then we drove around on the public roads in the area the afternoon before and scoped things out. In particular, we took note of a couple of prominent peninsulas that might be interesting to portage across, and found good spots to do so, even picking out access points that avoided poison ivy. And there was a place up north where an arm of the lake came near the road, with a driveway that we found that led to an abandoned barn covered with kudzu.
Race day came (that’s when we first got to see the boat and set it up), and we drew the last start. I think we had to get the controls in order, but I’m not sure. Aims was convinced that we had to pull out all stops to get an advantage on the faster paddlers, so he had me do a couple of controls on foot early on that might have been false economy. Then we were disappointed to see that #4 was up in a cove that was a dead giveaway to our “secret” portage. But although it seemed obvious to us, I think only one other boat went up and over, the others all paddled around, adding over two miles to the route.
Aims sent me off on foot again to #5 while he waited (that was definitely a bad move, slow going on shore), and we had a tiny time loss on #7 because it was slightly misplaced. Then came the real pivotal move on #8. It was a “dry” control, up a stream beyond the last point where it was navigable, so it had to be approached on foot (and it was a bit further up than shown). Before I got out of the boat, we made a plan, and it involved my probably not coming back.
That control wasn’t far from the kudzu-covered barn we had spotted the previous afternoon. And if I could make it through to that barn, I’d go up the driveway and run back to the finish. Aims would be waiting in case the vegetation was too thick, but it wasn’t, and I did the last mile and a half of the course on foot. I think the organizers were expecting that a few intrepid participants might portage the last little bit through the parking lot, but I definitely took them by surprise when I came running in from a different direction, with no boat, yelling FINISHING!
The rules in those days required only that you get the punchcard back, not the boat, and not the whole team (we successfully got that rule changed in later years). At the pre-race meeting, we had specifically asked about that, and it was entirely clear that running the punchcard back was okay. They did ask where my partner was, and I said he’d be back eventually. He had waited at the place where I had disembarked long enough to be convinced that I wasn’t coming back, then took his time paddling home.
We were the last to start, and the first back, and won that race by 33 minutes. We won three more national championships after that (and were course setters for several more, both individually and together), but we never again won by such a large margin. On the way back to the airport, we were proudly wearing our medals when we stopped at Taco Bell, and they were so impressed that they gave us free desserts.

C • Great story 2

Fractal Trails (Four Corners), In The Dark. I used to run here 15+ years ago, when I lived nearby, and it was the first place I ever encountered the kind of MTB trails that have since become common, where it looks like they've tried to fill the entire area with one long trail that twists and turns so much that if you were to leave it, you'd hit another part of it before you've gone more than a few feet. I'm pretty sure there's a lot more out there than what I ran on tonight. Got fairly well disoriented, and when I hit the power line ride I had to think a bit to figure out which way to go in order to get back to the parking lot. (But I did it correctly.) An inch or two of hard-frozen snow everywhere. GPS track is clearly flaky, because it shows my route crossing itself (didn't happen), and when I was at the end going back on the same trail I'd come out on, it shows are pretty far separated.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #7

Mike’s Maze: Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup Can (sprint), Massachusetts,10/20/2010
The first CMOUSA Champs had two races, just a Classic and a Sprint. I got pretty thrashed in the Classic, not dealing well with the scale and getting very lost early on. There were two entrances to the maze that year, the normal one on the east and another on the north side. The Classic had us going in on the east and the last control was near the north exit, and from there we ran around the outside to the finish.
For the Sprint, there were only four controls, and I went at it aggressively, getting through the 610 meter course in 3:36. There’s a note on the back of my map saying “no hope of remembering my route”. But I do remember one important thing. The last control was again near the north exit, or so it seemed. But there were a number of zigs and zags required to get to it, and I saw a better way. After coming out of the dead end where #4 was located, there was an open corridor due south to the curving top of the soup can, and that led straight back to the entrance. I think it was that route choice that made the difference, and got me my only 1st place finish in a corn maze event (not counting the corn maze trail-O a few years later when I spiked all of the controls with a drone).

Contemporaneous account here.

C • Ah, that's brilliant, and c... 2

The Woodlands, including the side roads, In The Dark. Connector out to Gilchrist was hard-frozen snow with a dusting of fresh powder, making for some delightful twkinking in the headlamp. Temp still in the mid 30s F, I guess (phone says just below freezing, thermometer is probably on the fritz), and I was a bit overdressed.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #6

Pawtuckaway State Park, New Hampshire, 8/30/2003
[Many of these memorable races occurred before the Attackpoint era, and I had at most a few sentences in my paper running logbook. This is one of the ones where I did have some comments on Attackpoint, so I was able to refresh my memory. I consider myself to have a good memory, but it's well known that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, and the more times you recall something, the less accurate your recollection becomes. I was surprised that some of the details that I remembered about this race were completely wrong. That raises the possibility that a lot of these accounts of memorable events are actually a lot of hooey.]

This was a sprint knockout tournament. The first race was a mass-start, and the results were used as a seeding list for the single-elimination rounds that followed. There were some big names in the field, but herd mentality got the better of most of them, because just about everybody sailed off into oblivion at a few different controls. I somehow kept my wits about me, and took my own path, which was the correct one, and I was the third one back, not far behind Marc Lauenstein, and just steps behind Balter.
See my notes


So, that set me up in a good position; as a high seed, I’d be facing someone in the next round who had been one of the slowest. Specifically, it was Jeff Lewis. I didn’t know Jeff, but it appeared what he lacked in the way of navigational expertise, he could make up for in terms of speed. With the two of us starting together, I was doomed, because all he had to do was to follow me around the course and outsprint me at the end, and I think his friends (Nova Scotia crowd?) were even advising him to do just that.
People sometimes talk about orienteering tactics, but in reality, that’s rarely a real concept. In this case, I had to invent some or there was no hope. Notice that the route on the map between #2 and #3 is missing. That’s because when I got to #2 and Jeff was stuck to me like glue, I just took off fast in a random direction to try to shake him. He waited when I paused to look at my map, and when I stopped to tie my shoe, but then we encountered some people who I knew were on the other course (there was a Red for Masters/Women), but maybe he didn't know that. I followed them a little, knowing they were not heading for our third control, then when he started following them, I quickly hid behind a tree. As soon as there was a little space between us, I took off as fast as I could possibly run the opposite way. I kept it up for as long as I could, and got myself completely lost. But that meant that I had probably gotten him completely lost as well. I relocated and found my way back to #3; my split for that 250 m control was 16:37. I was then in a situation where he had either latched onto another pair of Blue runners, or else he was toast. Once I got to #4 without him, there was no way he could follow me even if he found me. So I jogged around the rest of the course, and as I made my way leisurely down the finish chute, Jack Williams saw me and said, believe it or not, you won your heat. I just smiled and said, I know.
See notes


The next round had me up against Sergei Zhyk, and that was the end of the line for me. But those first two courses went very well!

C • Glad to make the list 4

Reindeer Quest, Chestnut Hill Farm, with Nancy (and Capone and Brook). AP guessed this as orienteering, and that's actually not too far off. We had a map (with trails and contours and open areas and everything), we decided where were going based on that map, and we were looking for things (though they were not indicated on the map). Pretty much covered all the trails at this place, and the potential for actual orienteering seemed pretty low (woods were featureless and kind of trashy). Might work as an introductory area for some local school if things really took off. A bit muddy, and pretty icy in places (could have used spikes). A bit chilly and windy, but certainly not bad for January.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #5

Lake George, Colorado, 6/23/1991 (Team Trials)
It’s not like I had a really stellar run on this course, though it wasn’t too bad. But it’s hard not to include it because it was such an epic course.
Lake George was one of the three maps (along with Saylor Park and Florissant) that were funded by a grant from the US Olympic Committee. Mikell Platt did the fieldwork, and the debut of Saylor and Lake George was at the 1991 Team Trials. Saylor came first, and was used for what is now known as Middle courses. Then came the long course on Lake George.
There’s not too much to be said about the course itself. I could have done a better job on the second control, but the rest went pretty well. At #4 I encountered Paul Bennett sitting on a rock, trying to figure out what to do on the next leg, and I told him to come on, let’s get going. On the way up to the saddle, I knocked loose a big rock that ran over my ankle, and that caused me trouble for the next few weeks (I finally had to use an Active Ankle for a while). And according to my memory, Jim and Mil Plant were staffing the water stop/map exchange – how the heck did they get there? I guess they must have forded the river. But they were so old, Jim was… um… 64? Seemed pretty old back then.
I finished in 8th place. Not too bad. But worth noting was that everybody ahead of me was named to the team (or as an alternate) for the WOC in Czechoslovakia. I had done poorly the day before, so I wasn’t really a candidate, but it felt good to have gotten that close.

The map was in two parts, sorry the scan quality isn't so great on this one.

Northfield-Highland-Turkey Hill. The same temperature that feels warm at night with the moon out seems somewhat less so in the middle of the day in a drizzle. I'm going to make an effort to make every day's exercise a different route from what I've done so far this year, as long as that remains interesting

Long ago (like, until about 500 years ago, I've heard), the calendar used to start with April, or thereabouts. That might make it easier to get off to a good start with New Year's resolutions.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #4

Clark State Forest, Indiana,10/11/2003 (US Rogaine Champs)
I approached Peter Gagarin with the idea of our doing a Rogaine together, and I felt pretty honored when he accepted. We picked the Lewis and Clark Cup, in Indiana, which was the US Champs event, and we drove out to it.
In our pre-start route planning, we determined that it was possible to get most or all of the controls, and the striking thing about the map was that the north and south sections were very different, with the latter being much steeper. At Peter’s suggestion, we planned a route that would save the steepest stuff for the nighttime, because it would be easier to navigate through well-defined terrain in the dark.
Looking back at the map, there’s a lot that I have no memory of. I know there was a huge traffic jam at the first control (#16). We had more errors than I remembered (mostly somehow just missing a control and having to turn back), and I recall that I was able to be useful in terms of navigation a few times. There was also a point, maybe around dusk, when Peter had a blister on his foot and enlisted my help to lance and drain it.
We accomplished a lot during the first part, and as planned, went into the canyons of the southern section in the dark. This was probably the steepest terrain I’ve ever orienteered in, steep enough that you had to do the climbs on all fours and grab trees to pull your way up. Peter got really quiet during this part, later explaining that he was concentrating hard as he was diligently pace counting since we couldn’t see very far (whatever lights we were using were not as good as even the cheap headlamps available these days). The climbs up and over the giant spurs were very taxing, and looking ahead, I was trying to count how many more we had left, and I asked Peter if it was three. He replied that it was seven. Because I was fading, we took the around route from #48 to #41, which was a mistake, because there was a lot of deadfall around the south end of that spur, and we got discombobulated into going up the wrong reentrant.
We got back to the hash house missing only the eleven low-value controls around the lake, and clearly not enough time to get them all. We went for two of them, but Peter could see what a wreck I was, and said that was enough, so we headed in with a half-hour left on the clock. We ended up in fourth place overall. The winning team was Mikell Platt and Jason Poole, and another of the teams ahead of us was Eric Bone and somebody we had never met before who was so strong that he literally dragged Eric around with an early version of the WeGo Team Link while Eric concentrated on reading the map. But we were the first-place Master’s team, so we did win national championship medals. I think Peter was disappointed, he had aspirations of doing better compared to those top teams, but that’s the thing about a Rogaine, you can’t go any faster than your partner. For this partner, it was an all-time highlight, and I’m proud to be one of the people who partnered with Peter, and by my standards, we did really well. It occurs to me that I’m now the age that he was when we did this.
I have the maps from this event (I have virtually all of my race maps), but I was delighted that a search through my old backup hard drives turned up the composite digital map that I created shortly after the event, with our route. As with all of the maps in this series, you can click for a larger version.

Down Holman, trail along the brook, back up and out to Gilchrest and home, In The Dark. About half pavement and half packed snow, another warmish evening (mid 30s F). So much nicer to be in the woods than on roads. Saw a couple of deer.

C • streak 1

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #3

Whitehorse Gap, Georgia, 7/1/2004 (Bubbagoat)
I had gone down to northern Georgia for the Convention, not because I like conventions, but because I had been asked to teach a mapping seminar. (I hate conventions.) The class went pretty well, and we had good facilities, including a basemap that we were able to do training on. The base had been made into a finished map that was being used for the convention, and for one session we went on a map walk with Sam Smith, who had done the fieldwork, where he explained to the class the mapping decisions that he had made. I lagged behind, bewildered, because the map in my hand bore little to no resemblance to the terrain. It was terrible. This was gold mining terrain, unusual in the US, but the map was bizarre.
One of the races was the Bubbagoat, a Billygoat-style race held in the South. One of the traditions that they have at this event is that if you run in bib overalls, you get a fifteen-minute head start. Knowing this, I had commissioned Jeanne Walsh to make me a pair of bib overalls out of denim-colored dacron, and they came out great, looking quite realistic. When I showed up at the start and asked for my head start, the meet director, came over, took a feel of the fabric, and said nothin’ doin’. I negotiated then, how about a fifteen-yard head start?, and he said okay. I positioned myself fifteen yards ahead of the (small) pack, and when we flipped our maps, I saw that I had been boondoggled, because he had set us up facing the wrong way and I was fifteen yards behind. Served me right.
Bill Cusworth was my main competition, and he got ahead pretty quickly. Everybody else disappeared as well, and soon I was alone. I have a vague memory that it was either really humid or raining or something. For the next couple of hours, I was struggling through nasty terrain in unfavorable conditions with a crummy map. The route shown on the map looks a lot better than I remember, I felt like I was losing huge amounts of time, and was getting pretty disgusted. We were apparently allowed two skips; for the controls that I did, I measured the course at a little over 8 km.
Finally, I staggered to the finish, exhausted. Bill was there, and a few meet officials, and I was probably grumbling about how tough it had been. They chuckled, not seeming all that sympathetic. At some point I asked what place I had gotten, figuring that the other finishers had gone back to their cars, and I was told, um, you won. Huh? What about Bill? Bill said that he had quit, early on, I think.
Not a very good run. But first place, how ‘bout that?

C • Mapping 4

I decided that for the new year I want to try and have some kind of loggable exercise every day for as long as I can manage. But today I had a headache that I couldn't shake, and I also strained my right lower back sometime in the past couple of days (don't know if it was shoveling or hang gliding or both).

But it's pretty pathetic to have my streak be only a single day.

Warm evening (mid 30s F), so no hat or gloves needed, just a shirt, jacket, O pants, and a headlamp (In the Dark, natch). I also wore these weird shoe lights that I bought a few years ago but had never used, but it was really quiet out there, I saw only two cars. And just the most minimal around-the-block loop that I have available.

Gotta start again somewhere.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #2

Gay City State Park, Connecticut, 5/17/1998 (Troll Cup)
(This one is really petty, but I did a pretty good job.)
I was living in Colorado at the time, but making trips back to New England several times a year. One of these trips coincided with the Troll Cup, but unfortunately I got very sick a few days before the event. I was staying at my parents’ house, and my mother urged me to not go. But I wanted to see the new map that Clint had made, so I compromised and switched from M21 to M-Open Brown. And I went out the first day, coughing and sneezing and wheezing, but I walked every step, never ran even once.
The wisdom in those days was that the old people on Brown were not fast runners, but they were excellent navigators. I was therefore puzzled at the results, which showed me in second place, behind only Al Smith in M65 by about 14 minutes, with Dennis Porter (in my category) 97 seconds down on me. Where were all these other excellent navigators? It wasn’t like I outran them, anybody could have gone at my walking pace. (Things are different these days.)
Sunday was a chase start, and my head cold had improved quite a bit overnight, so I felt like I could run. This being the Troll Cup, it was a chase start, and Peter Gagarin looked at the start list and the course length (4.6 km), and said, you know, you might be able to catch Al (Peter was no fan of his). I decided he was right, and decided to give it a shot.
Catching Al was going to require making no mistakes, and if I pulled that off, I wouldn’t see him until close to the end. Looking at my route, I’d say I did a good job, the only thing that I’d do different would be to leave the trails earlier on #3 and approach the control directly from the south. But it was good enough, somewhere between #6 and #7 (I think), I spotted Al. Easy enough to reel that old man in, and then I stopped looking at my map and just followed him around, a step or two behind, which clearly had him a bit rattled. Right on his tail as we came around the south end of the lake (that Steve Fluegel famously made the cover of O/NA by swimming across), so when we hit the sand I turned on the afterburners and left him in the dust.
A mean thing to do. But my only regret was that PG wasn’t there at the finish to see it.

Dragging my hang glider and harness up to the Talcott launch from the gate, on the cart, with Sam helping out for the steep parts. Decided at the last moment to put on spiked O-shoes, which was good, because the footing was quite icy and treacherous, both on the hike up and on launch. Charlie showed up after we were mostly set up and helped us launch, which was great (we hiked around a bit to warm up while we waited for the too-strong wind to subside). The air was strong and kind of trashy, and the sun was getting low by the time we launched, so we didn't fly for overly long, but it got the year off to an early start.

J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #1

Inspired by PG's Top Ten List, I decided to go though my own orienteering history and pick out ten notable races. I actually came up with eleven, but the first one is kind of just a footnote (with no map), and another is a race I didn't technically run, so it's close enough to ten. And they're not necessarily my best results (though some are), but they feel like they were significant events, thus the title of the list.

We start with...

Some Army Base, probably Massachusetts, 10/20/1979
I don’t have the map from my first point-to-point orienteering course. I had done a group score-O a year earlier in high school, then in my freshman year in college I signed up for a seminar called Land Navigation, taught by the ROTC department. It was in that class that I learned all the important things about orienteering from Sergeant Bell, like plotting coordinates, intersection, resection, modified resection, etc.
We had two field trips in that class. The first one was to some army base, where we were piggybacking onto an event that the ROTC upperclassmen were putting on for the plebes (or whatever you call them at MIT) and I don’t even know where (I fell asleep on the bus). Seems logical that it would have been Devens, but I’ve looked all over Devens on maps and GoogleEarth, and I can’t find anywhere that matches what I remember. When we got there, there was a place where 100 m was marked out on the ground, and they had us calibrate our pace counts. Then they handed out compasses, nice big army lensatic ones. But based on my experience in high school, I had gone out the day before and bought myself a Silva Polaris.
They told us to form groups of three, and I was with Scott Minneman, who lived in my dorm, and a guy named Ed. The advice from Sergeant Bell was that one of us should read the map, one should read the compass, and the third should pace count. I had the fancy compass, and Scott said he’d handle the map, so Ed agreed to do the counting. We were the third group in line, and we watched the first two groups heading out across the field in front of us, each with one person burying his nose in the map, another staring intently at the compass, and the third blindly counting paces.
Scott and I looked at the map, and it was obvious to us that the first control was on the hill that we could see at the far end of the field. We nodded to each other, yeah, we got this, and Ed looked at us and said, you guys aren’t planning to run are you? We looked back at him and said, of course we are.
The field had a bunch of ridges in it, perpendicular to our direction of travel, that I think weren’t shown on the map. When they said go, Scott and I took off, with Ed starting out pacing 1, 2, 3, 4, hey, wait for me! We crested the first rise and realized that this was a shooting range and the ridges had concrete drop-offs on the back side with machines behind them for raising targets. So we detoured to the left side of the field, ran along the edge, and got to the control on the hill just as the first of the two groups ahead of us was cruising past it.
The course was maybe something like a Yellow, I don’t know what the length was, but there were five controls. The map was a B&W slightly marked up USGS, with things like trails and stone walls added. In the middle of the course we stopped because we thought we should be at the control, having attacked from the end of a stone wall. One of the cadets who was running the event, and who was stationed in the woods to provide assistance, came over and said, here, you must be lost, let me help you. I quickly realized that the wall wasn’t mapped quite right, it was either longer or shorter than the map showed, and we grabbed the map back from him and went to the control.
We crushed that course. Sprinting in to the finish, we slammed our punchcard (actually a card that we had to write letters on) down on the table, and the cadets in charge of the finish said, oh, giving up? We said no, we’re not giving up, we’re done! They looked at the card, and realized that we were done, and they seemed astonished.
At the following week’s class, Sergeant Bell congratulated everyone on kicking the cadets’ butts. Yeah. It wasn’t everyone, it was me and Scott, with Ed in tow. And I thought, yeah, this is fun, I think I’d like to do a lot more of it.