Training Log Archive: CleverSky

Brooksby Farm, Green course, which was more like Orange, but about all you can do with this place. Magnus (course setter) and I talked about it afterwards, and we both felt that it would be worth redoing from scratch as an ISSOM map, as there's enough going on that it could be okay for sprints, but as it is, it's a pretty lame map (he made a bunch of improvements leading up to the meet, but there's only so much you can do in that scenario). I had never run on this map before, though I had been to the place once years ago for the NEOC picnic/meeting, and remember it because there was a newcomer there who I had never met who was asking a bunch of obnoxious questions at the meeting: that was my first encounter with Michael Commons.

Even though I showed up at the registration table before 10:45, they had already run out of Green maps. I said I'd be fine with copying the Green course onto another map, and they gave me an Orange map because they shared some controls. The map was still a confusing mess, though, and thanks to a screwup on my part, I gave myself an unusual birthday present: an orienteering mulligan. I ran to the trivial first control, and there was nothing there. Huh? I was absolutely certain that I was in the right place, and I had drawn the circle so well that I mistakenly thought that it was one of the printed ones from the Orange course. This made no sense, so I went back to the start, looked at the Green map again, and saw that my circle was on the wrong trail junction, less than 50 m short, but just out of sight beyond a dip in the terrain. And I started over and ran the course pretty much without issue, other than a couple of route choices that turned out to be not that great due to map shortcomings, and a 180 out of the last control that went just a couple of steps. As of when I left, I was in first place (out of 18) by over six minutes. Low-hanging fruit, when everybody who's anybody is in Pennsylvania (or putting on the meet), and it may not hold up in the final results, but it's nice for the moment anyway.

Not first, but not bad. Note that third place is Dean, and it's his birthday today, too.

Today's course was my 1300th orienteering race, with somewhere over 20500 controls visited. One interesting goal might be to orienteer on every day of the year, and at this point I'm missing 40 dates; most of those are in the winter, which might necessitate moving to a different climate. The missing dates are between Dec 14 (which I'll get at this year's RHIN-O!) and Mar 12, plus (oddly) Sep 2, 4, and 5. The latest date in any year that I've orienteered was Dec 19, which was my first ever course, in 1978.