Training Log Archive: levitin

Event: NEOC: Wells Foot and MTB-O and AGM
 

A disappointing turnout for the club's first MTB-O event since 1996. Those who were lucky enough to have come did enjoy themselves. One man and his young son both rode the Intermediate, made different route choices on one long leg, and said they had a great time.

SGB, after DNFing the Beginner course when he failed to locate one control, then went out on the Advanced, logging the fastest time on the day. He edged JoeB by under 2 minutes. JoeB said he had a couple of instances where he visited the wrong control and had to ride extra distance in order to take them in the proper order.

Overall I was surprised by how fast people rode the courses. I was not surprised by how sparingly the top riders carried or pushed their bikes on the really steep/gnarly sections. I figured there were quite likely to be much stronger riders than I am, so it was fitting to set really challenging legs.

Several people appreciated the fact that I set a control at the top of Carpenter's Rock (the highest point in the park). Even if they didn't enjoy slogging up the hill, they enjoyed the view from the summit and also the ride on the way down.

Setting all the controls for today's 3 MTB-O courses.

Retrieving a (thankfully) much smaller number of MTB-O controls. Several willing helpers retrieved some far-flung controls.

I rode some of the routes in the reverse direction from during the race, and even managed 1 endo.

Legs quite tired.

Map Production at FedEx/Kinko's.

This process went exceedingly smoothly. I was quite surprised at how painless it was. My last memory of printing foot-O maps at this same Kinko's location in 2010 was of several hours spent tweaking the scale, borders, etc, as well as the printing part itself taking much longer. I think their system has been souped up as well. In 2010, they had a time-consuming process that rasterized the map image from my exported postscript(?). So for each course (WYOG, maybe R, too), there was a 15-30 minute delay for the first copy, then once I approved, all the copies came out in a minute or two after the first.

In 2013, I delivered color PDF on a thumb drive, which I produced from OCAD V10 viewer from OCAD V6 map files for 3 different courses. Each proof copy took only a minute or two to download from the thumb drive and print before I could inspect the scale, features, colors, etc. Then all the copies came out in a couple of minutes.

In short, because of the heavy rain and construction on Rt 9 on my route to FedEx/Kinko's, I spent more time driving to and from (~40-50 minutes) than I spent in the store (~30 minutes or less).

A pleasant finish to an at times unpleasant mapping project.

Several hours of map wrangling.

More trail validation at Wells SP. Gorgeous water features, fun to ride across, only problem is they're disconnected from the main part of the park. Oh well. I found some other quite fun-to-ride sections.