Discussion: And the winners are...

Preliminary results, top teams
Max 3600 pts.

Men

1. 1990 Team Eastern Europe (Peteris Ledins, Murray Maitland)
2. 1680 phast Generation (Ken Walker Sr., Glen Brake) (1MM, 1SVM)
3. 1670 TBD (Dennis Wilkinson, Jonas Kjall)

Mixed

1. 1530 Racing With Giant Dirty Avocados (Cindy Choi, Donato Polignone, Catra Corbett, Jonathan Owens, Andrew Peterson)
2. 1480 Nightcrawlers (Eric Smith, Mary Smith) (1MX, 1SVX)

Women

1. 1630 Proceeding On (Sharon Crawford, Natalia Babeti) (1MW, 1SVW)

Tough, cold, wet overnight conditions forced nine of the 26 24-hour teams to finish during the night. The rest braved steep, slippery slopes and varied vegetation; the supervets clearly had an edge over the youngsters in coping with the adversity. All seemed to enjoy the two hash houses and the new, precise map. Full results of the 24 hour event will be posted tonight, while splits and the results of the shorter concurrent events will wait until we retrieve and query several of the SPORTident units

Wohoo team Eastern Europe! Congrats Peteris, Murray!

To all participants, great job toughing it out there against the elements.

Hoping fore more details from the race as well as maps :)

Nice job, Vladimir!

Oh good, Peteris won! I was worried that Peteris would be in trouble when Nikolay decided to race for the car. New wheels for Nikolay, shiny medal for Peteris! Everybody wins!

Will post the map today. Preliminary 24 hour results are up.

I totally blanked on checking what state Valerie's SPORTident kit was in when I received it, but it wouldn't have helped much since I received the SI masters well after when the bulk of the units had to be placed. So, two Clears and two Checks were out in the woods, as well as about four duplicates. Next time I'll know what to do, this time I'll be trying to recover for the next two days. Fortunately the Clears were in places that a mostly complete recovery is possible even without querying the Clears—one was way out where even Peteris and Murray couldn't reach, and the other one was the second checkpoint for most teams who went to it.

The attendance was 70 for the 24 hour event (26 teams), about 170 overall, including the shorter 4 hours events on Saturday and Sunday, and 8 hours on Saturday.

Respect! :)

The map.

Looks hard core.

clue sheet ?

There was one. Checkpoints are at the precise center of each circle.

Wow! I have heard poison oak was terrible in some venues. I never imagined it would earn it's own map symbol. Great map!

There was a lot more of it than mapped. Thanks to Tecnu for providing us with ample product.

...I have heard poison oak was terrible...never imagined it would earn it's own map symbol...

I wonder if it shows up distinctly on Lidar? Or did the mapper just sketch it in roughly, while muttering under his breath and scratching his crotch?

At the time of the year when the photos were taken, large expanses of PO appear more reddish on the photos. We sketched these in. We also added a small handful of large areas with thick undergrowth, most of which was PO, that the course setters encountered while placing the checkpoints.

I have not found a way to reliably distinguish PO on lidar. The derived kernel density indeed shows areas on north-facing slopes that have fewer trees and more bush, but these are a subset of the reddish areas on the photos and don't add much to the available info.

Looks like the Bay Area, it does... on steroids!

Is it a Rogaine mapping standard to depict vegetation USGS-style, i.e. white = open / green = forest?

Yep. We spent a lot of time this year thinking of creating/adapting a cartograhic standard for our rogaines. We have made a lot of progress in that direction. Ideally there'd be a uniform but dual standard for forested and urban events, based on ISOM and ISSOM but modified to fit the different conditions. Plain ISOM does not work well for rogaines of either variety.

One major difference between rogaining and orienteering is extended low-light conditions. For a lot of people, at night it is hard to tell yellow from green. It was dark for 13+ hours at this years' Coe rogaine. Also, the dotted veg-boundary symbol does not really stand out well in low light. Therefore the two-color scheme, which seemed a natural fit and an easy step for those accustomed to reading ordinary topo maps.

Where it gets more interesting is in urban environments; the goal is to have a standard appropriate for generalized depiction of large developed areas. USGS's gray/pink work acceptably well, but there's room for improvement if we'd like to show more grades of passability/restrictions on entry. I'll leave urban areas for another discussion.

In further response to GuyO's question about whether the color choice is a rogaine standard, there is currently no such standard for color or symbol convention in the IRF rules and guidelines, and a rather broad range of scales permitted (for which this particular map falls outside the range, if my memory serves me correctly). Rogaining had its roots as a sport based on existing general purpose topographic maps, and is still often held on such maps. However, national standards for government-issue topo maps vary greatly from one country to another, and some work out better than others. From my perspective, specially produced maps such as this one can make for a much more navigationally interesting event, as long as they are well thought out and combined with good course design. This map was in my opinion really great, and the combination of the map, terrain, and the course design created the most fun of the five 24 hour rogaines I've taken part in this year, narrowly edging out two other events with special purpose maps, both of which had different scales and color choices. All of these special purpose maps seemed very well suited to the terrain in which they were used. I also enjoyed the other two events which were based much more closely on government-issue maps, but felt quite a bit of frustration on occasions coming up on terrain which seemed very different in the field from what I had been led to expect in advance from the map.

control 47: rentrant, indistinct junction

what does "indistinct" mean? not on the map, but it is recognizeable once there on foot ?

control 50: narrow clearing, S end

are these narrow clearings like a 5-10 meter wide swath in the woods, with grass and low brush ?

control 65: reentrant junction

on the map, can't really see two reentrants (i see just one...)

control 59: waterfall, at top

the feature is not on the map. I guess it is ok to do so in a rogaine ...

Checkpoint 47: The junction is on the map, it's just hard to see. The secondary reentrant goes off to the SSE.

Checkpoint 50: Yes. Actually more like just a linear gap between trees seen on the aerial. They show up better as black dashed lines than double-green-lined white.

Checkpoint 65: The secondary reentrant branches to the north.

Checkpoint 59: It was dry, so we went easy on the stream symbol. Dried-up waterfall, on top.

50 was easy to find, we came in from the side up onto the spur.

It was raining when we got to 59, but no water in the stream. But it would have been tumbling over the edge, if it had any flow. Also easy to find once you got around the ground clutter. We came in to the right and went downstream about 30 m to it.

Did get frustrated with 80. Down and back from above; it seemed pretty far down the clearing. Clue N edge not useful.

As a non-rogainer (6 hr max), first, congrats to the success of some very familiar O' names: 2nd for Ken&Glen; 2nd for the Smith's'; and how about Sharon's and Natalia's 4th overall!

Second, I never expected to see a rogaine with so many 'subtle' sites - of course, that was dependent on an unusually accurate map. Overall, does this reflect a new trend in rogaines?

They would be subtle if the contour interval had been 2.5 meters... it is 10.

Did get frustrated with 80.

The map east of the N–S line that passes through Checkpoint 80 is not the same quality as the (good) map west of the line. Most of the former has USGS-map vegetation. The better map has lidar and photo-derived veg. I warned people about this at the pre-start briefing. I expect to fix this part of the map before next year's event.

Oops, I thought the good vegetation mapping was East of the line...

Oh I goofed up! The good veg is certainly east of the line. Checkpoint 80 itself was mostly mapped ad-hoc. I drew in a clearing and then the placer thought the clearing extended farther up the slope, and placed the flag higher up. I then expanded the clearing on the map, including stuff that I wouldn't normally call a clearing. Eric Bone went there and didn't think it wasn't particularly fair.

That whole western wedge will be fixed in time by next year's event.

Any 8hr results?

I think tomorrow. The Clear and Check units (that were on the course) made it out of the woods yesterday, and I got them today.

tsk tsk tsk.. ;)

Just started to get something sensible out of the results program. These are not for wide release, since these are only based on the info in SPORTident fingers that were read; I didn't add anything from the units yet, nor manual credits for units that didn't work. Hopefully tomorrow morning I'll have better data. There are a lot of teams between 500 points and 600 points, so I can't even say for sure where your team stands, perhaps 5th in the 8 hours or so.

There is another update at the same place. Unfortunately it feels like truly a titanic effort to try to rescue the results, and I have to stop until next week, or else our upcoming event will suffer. I still hope to eventually get this through...

Congratulations to Vlad and his fellow organizers/volunteers and to all the participants. Map does look sweet. It sure sounds like the elements played a role - which is apropos in a championship Rogaine. Look forward to hearing more feedback on the event!

Maybe you could just add totals and self reported route choice to the same document that has 24 results? I think most folks do not care as much about precise splits, as all took a different route. But I was curious at how all teams traveled.

But now my friend is asking me if there are other events like that around. Great way to get new people in - traditional orienteering course is tougher for a novice to handle alone, and adventure racing is very gear intensive. Walk around the hills was just perfect.

There is some stuff on RouteGadget. I believe all that it's missing, for 4 and 8 hour teams, is records from Checkpoint 20 and the ones that didn't have SPORTident stations by the time teams got there. I will get to updating that shortly.

On RouteGadget, you can select your course (e.g. 8 hours) and hit "View routes". It'll be great when it's complete!

We plan to host Get Lost!! in Fort Ord on 18 February (limited to on-trail travel only, foot or bike), and Get Lost!! in Black Diamond on 18 March (with off-trail but most likely without bikes). Bay Area Orienteering Club is also planning on getting its Scramble (= rogaine) series going in 2012.

I updated the splits. They represent a complete set of the 8 hour and 4 hour results. I will have condensed 8 hour and 4 hour results posted later today. Please let me know if your team is missing credit for any of the checkpoints—this could have happened for 8 hour teams (which started first) for a few controls for which the SPORTident wasn't placed in time.

Most of the units are out of the woods, so throughout next week I will rebuild the 24 hour results. For 24 hour teams, most of their SPORTident card records haven't been used yet, I gave up once I realized too much was cleared by the midcourse Unit 76.

keep at it Vlad -- your efforts are much appreciated!

I took RouteGadget offline because although it is possible to update the splits file every time it is regenerated with new data, it turns out RG does not have a mechanism to replace the "courses" associated with each team. So, say the first time around Team A is credited with Checkpoints 20, 30, and 40, and has splits for these CPs; RG will create a unique "course" for this team that consists of S–20–30–40–F. Next time when I retrieve a few more units from the woods and add their data to the splits, RG will only allow me to replace the splits but not the courses. So it still thinks Team A is on a course that consists of Checkpoints 20, 30, and 40, even though I have found splits for it also for Checkpoints 21, 31, and 41. I can fix this manually but I'd prefer not to do it multiple times. And I would have to do a manual fix on each update if any routes have been entered. So, the plan is to put RouteGadget up again when the 24 hour team splits have been compiled.

The splits are correct and complete as to the checkpoint order, for 8 hour and 4 hour teams.

Good idea to limit Ord to trails. I was getting plenty of poison oak there even on trails - during mountain bike races. :) We are in.

I feel for you with the electronics f-up. ;) Happens. And you should ask folks for a deposit on loaners. :)

The posted splits are now believed to be correct and complete for teams placing 16 (overall) and below. Since almost all units are now back from the woods, I expect to finish the results early next week.

There will be some changes to 24 hour placings vs. what was announced at the event; checkpoints were claimed by some 24 hour teams for which I could not find evidence of a visit by either team member in the SPORTident station. These teams will not get credit for these checkpoints. (However, the 8 hour and 4 hour results that have been posted are believed to be correct.)

The latest revision includes all but 10 SI units, and adding data from these units can add points to 7 teams: phast Generation, Proceeding On, Racing with GDA, TBD, Norcal, baarbd, and D & D. Points for the rest of the teams are final. Please let me know if yours is missing any.

The winning team's straight-line route was 40.5 km; they were averaging 2.4 checkpoints/hour for the first 10 hours, and then the rate dropped abruptly to about one per hour. I believe phast Generation actually covered more ground, but had less climb and fewer checkpoints.

All the units are back from the woods, I just need to get my hands on them.

Any news on Fort Ord?

Permit is in the works. Date changed to 03 March; there is something else going on in Ft. Ord on the originally announced date. Some info will be posted shortly. Registration will open around New Year. Durations will be 2 hours and 4 hours, encompassing all of Ft. Ord Public Lands.

The latest splits encompass all but three queried units, and records from these three can/will increase the scores of teams TBD, baarbd, and D & D. For everyone else, the scores are final. It turns out Eastern Europe did edge out phast Generation for the longest distance travelled!

RouteGadget will be up as soon as I retrieve these three boxes from Palo Alto and query them.

The results and splits are now final. Please let me know if your team is missing anything before I recreate RouteGadget, since it will be harder for me to fix RG if any of the splits/CP order are wrong.

RouteGadget is again available. The map is georeferenced, so no adjustment is necessary for your GPS tracks.

There is a complete set of split times for this event, so selecting "View Routes" will show checkpoint order for each team and every team member even if no route has been entered. Please note that we didn't always record which team member wore which SPORTident fingerstick, so the correspondence between routes and team members may not be exactly correct. If there is a discrepancy between the routes that members of the same team apparently took, it is most likely due to one of the three checkpoints that was programmed as Check or Start; a lot of team members didn't punch after the first member's fingerstick didn't beep, so we didn't get records of their visits.

Happy routes!

Any news on Fort Ord?

Yes it's coming together!

@T/D: What's the difference between a 2-hour rogaine and a 2-hour score-O? Just the map?

No difference at all that I can see... score-O, Street Scramble, rogaine, Adventure Run, and perhaps others refere to essentially the same activity.

The first- and third-place teams posted their routes on RouteGadget... as you can see, at night this terrain isn't so easy even for the most experienced navigators! Info is coming up shortly about this November's Adventure Trex.