Discussion: Largest orienteering event day in North America?

Would that be today? 1150 participants sure is a lot!

What's happening? Wednesday Adventure?

It's real orienteering, on a 1:10000 map. SI timing, too. The races should be going on as I'm typing this.

This, sounds awesome.

Someone is paying attention!

More details here.

If they all run, yes. That's a fantastic number!

Ed Scott/DVOA's MASOC had 1,143 participants in 1998.

Looks like the Hamilton race was in the ballpark last year, with 1067 participants in the results.

Noticed the use of youth hockey terms (Midget, Bantam), for kids born in 1998-2001. Do they correspond at all to the actual hockey age groups?

Regardless, 1,150 junior orienteers in 2013 is beyond imnpressive!

"Adventure running" sounds more fun than orienteering. Excellent results!

Just saw this thread now....

Today's Hamilton schools race (38th annual by the way) had about 1050-1075 participant starts [EDIT: 1087 participants] as there were a few no shows due to the poor weather (windy, rain and +8C). It was cool to see so many students orienteering today and especially cool to see many of our Adventure Running Kids and Adventure Running X (ARX) teenagers racing pretty darn well.

Age-group categories follow the names used in most school sports in Hamilton.

Today's the day where Hamilton goes for the record again!

Does Hamilton/Canada have an expensive executive director initiative?

Good show in any case.

Dontgetlost has two market-rate, full-time employees. It also doesn't organize any "seven-course B meets" and charges market rate for the events it does organize.

Attack Point needs a 'like' button.

Today's race was our 39th annual Hamilton Adventure Running Schools Challenge. Despite cool temps, rain and wind it was also our largest schools challenge yet. About 1250 kids were pre-registered but there were about 100 no shows. We need to cross check changes teachers may have made to their rosters to finalize the participants names (and numbers) in the results. Anyway, here are some recent participation numbers:
2011 - 978 participants
2012 - 1069
2013 - 1087
2014 - 1151 (based on prelim results)

If true, 1151 > 1143! Biggest ever! Congrats!

Looking at the Hamilton School Challenge race info, it appears that you are doing 1 min starts? How many start at the same time? How long does it take to go through all starts?
And somewhere it says: Registration may be
limited to the first 500 entries.
But then you end up with more than double? So I am wondering how one decides on the first number and on the ultimate number of entries. Is that permitting related?

We need to cross check changes teachers may have made to their rosters to finalize the participants names (and numbers) in the results

BTDT! (@ FP/IS)

re: entries. First number is the number of participants we can handle with our own and Orienteering Ontario's SI cards. The final number is based on how many SI cards we end up with through borrowing and renting. If we had more SI we would have more participants. A big thank you to those groups, individuals and organizations that helped us with our SI needs. Most participants run as teams of two though teams of 3 or solo are also permitted.

re: start interval. 1 minute 'waves' on the bantam and midget course with multiple teams starting at the same time. Start window is about 100 minutes. Teams get to look at their map for one minute before starting. Keeping the start window short makes for a better race atmosphere (and longer lines at the food trucks after the event).

Are there any pictures from the event?

ARK posted some on their Facebook page yesterday.

So the term "adventure running" works for you. Around here a school event in a region with population 100,000 got 954. It was called a rogaine. Seriously cool term round here...

@Hammer that looks like you need something like 500 SI cards. WOW!

611 to be precise. We had 616 :)

I was talking to the schools challenge race director this morning and 1151 is indeed our official participation number! So when I told him that was apparently a NorAm record he replied "if the weather was better we would have had 1250!" ;-)

Good thing the weather wasn't better--otherwise you would have been short 94 SI sticks!

We had enough sticks.