11/12 - Classic at Fair Hill A-Meet (map; results)

11/11 - Sprint at Fair Hill (map; results)

10/23 - ROC Meet at Oatka Creek Park - Orange Plus Yellow Course (map-o; map-y; results)

Had a decent start, but ran into a significant problem going to C7 - the "7" on the map was next to the C9 circle, which I failed to notice on the run, so I had to come back to C7 and carry on.  The other significant delay (combined, these two were all that separated me from Sergey) came on C17 where I came across the field too high, and couldn't spot the well-hidden control behind a big shrub, that also prevented me from noticing the shallow reentrant.  The Yellow course was mostly just "run hard", although I did lose at least 1 minute on the first two controls by not having prepared to use the second punch card.  Also lost time leaving C11 on the new twisty trail, in the hopes that I could find a spot to run straight S to C12, but there were no good gaps.

Nate had another solid run on Yellow - winning by about 13 minutes, but he was still about 10 minutes behind me.  Chris and Zach were second on the White course, but they were slow, walking the rest after they missed C6 and made it all the way to C7 before realizing it.

10/10 - Thanksgiving O-Cross at Palgrave Conservation Area, last day of the Ontario Champs (loop 1; loop 2; loop 3; results; splits)

Since we were only registered for Monday, the race crew was confused and didn't have maps prepared for us. Since this was a Farsta, that could have been a problem. But, luckily, Hammer was a no-show, so they gave me his maps. Big shoes to fill, and it didn't take long to choke. 

Not having run a Farsta before, I wasn't sure how this was going to work, but I was able to take off in the middle of the pack towards the first (forked) control. My location was easy - just over the top of a hill - so I was in decent position for the run into C2 (a common control). I had a good route ready to C3 and executed well to stay near the group. Then it was over. I tried to hit the mapped bridge in the swamp, but everyone else went right (N) of me, and I lost contact. Instead of trying to follow the noise and regain contact heading to a common control, I slowed down and tried to find an indistinct trail, gave up, crossed the swamp too far S, overcorrected to the N and lost over 10 minutes on the control, making me suddenly very lonely. A couple more mistakes turned the first loop into a 40:12 disaster. The 2nd loop was cleaner (no 10-minute mistake), and I got a surge of energy when Jon Torrance lapped me, wound up in 30:08. The long weekend caught up with me on the 3rd loop, so although I new what to expect, and kept it pretty clean, I was running out of gas an finished it in 28:54. 

That was a fun format: I really liked the high-energy running generated by the mass start (and wish it could have lasted longer). I should be able to do much better in my next Farsta.

10/9 - BFLO Event at Camp Schoellkopf - "Red" Course (map; results)

Was more like an Orange course in difficulty and distance.  Thought running around on so many legs was a good choice, until I compared splits with David Levine.  My legs were a little heavy after yesterday, so I wasn't particularly fast, but it was probably the cleanest course I've ever run. Even though the course was quite easy, this is still a huge boost for my confidence. Running around to C2 seems to have cost me well over 2 minutes, and running around to C5 cost me over a minute.  My only execution error was that I went the wrong way leaving C9, which cost me about 90s. As best as I know, I was second to David, but I haven't seen results. The time per K is slow, but I estimated the climb to be 5%, and I had to do a lot more running around on trails than usual.

Zach did the two white courses with Brigid.

10/8 - ROC Event at Powder Mills Park - Long Orange Course (map; results)

Nate started 2 minutes ahead of me and had the same first 2 controls. C1 was a trail run, and I cut thru the woods leaving it, and intercepted Nate in the clearing. He led me up the trail but went right and the control was left, so I got there first. I left, allowing a spur to push me too far east to the swamp, so Nate (with a different C3) beat me to the trail down below. Trying to keep up with him, as he effortlessly cleared a log, I caught my trailing big toe and went down hard, knocking the wind out of myself (and later noticed my elbow was swollen almost to the size of a golf ball). C3 thru C8 went very smoothly. Although the map was revised in Sept 2005, the trails leading in the direction of C9 seemed off, and I was only saved by the control being in a distinct clump of pines, but only after running well past the control. C10 was a major blunder that cost me the race, and then some (I lost by 2 minutes, but lost 10 minutes on this control). I came down the hill to the swamp, and should have been just SE of the mapped trail (which not mapped indistinct in last month's revision) thru the swamp. Didn't find it to my right (even though I went a more-than-sufficient 100m), so I came back and checked left - nope. Not wanting to waste more time, I tried to just head W thru the swamp. As I picked my way thru, I ended up heading S, and even a little E, almost exiting the park. Had to run around the swamp, then climbed above the green too far and missed C10 high, had to relocate 200m north, then come back. C11 was a pit that was just before the reentrant, not in it, as it looked on the map, so I lost most of a minute there, before heading in after 1 last climb.

9/18 - DVOA Meet at Hickory Run (part of DVOA Training Weekend) - Red Course (map; results)

Started off very well for being out of town (given my history). Was right on the first 2 controls and was quite proud of myself for successfully running around via a rocky reentrant (up about 600m) and cutting in at the right spot to get to C3. C4 thru C7 were pretty straightforward (though I lost a minute each being off line to C4 and C5). C8 was a longish challenging leg, but I had a nice plan and almost executed flawlessly (cut to the control too early from a fence when I thought a depression was a ditch). Then all hell broke loose. Grabbing a drink at C8, I forgot to punch - not realizing this until I was approaching C9 and had this uncanny feeling that I hadn't punched. So, I lost 10.5 minutes going back to C8 and returning to C9, very depressed, for the start of the nightmare leg. There was no way out of C9; I was surrounded by mountain laurel constantly for the first 600m or so to the south (which looked quite white with some light/med green mixed in, so I don't think west to get to a trail quicker would have been doable with its dark green abundance). After fighting thru all of this, it was time to run, and I was beat. Leaving C10, there was a strong band of dark green along the river I had to cross, so I tried to run around to the east, thought I saw a gap, but wasn't far enough - crossed the river OK, but after I had started to climb the other side, I ran into mountain laurel that I actually had to crawl through. Disobeyed first instinct and didn't proceed immediately to the trail (thought I could stay in the woods), but eventually decided to bail to the trail anyway. C12 was easy and I should have been home free, safely under the 2 hours that I had told Chris would be the pick up time for heading to a Wilkes Barre sports bar for the Bills game. I traded off a longer run to C13 to give myself an easy attack point, but totally screwed it up - allowed myself to be distracted by another orienteer. After > 30 minutes of wandering I was bailing out west to the power line trail (300m+ away), when I hit a trail after only 150m. Somehow I had drifted about 400m southwest of where I thought I was wandering. Ran to the bend in the trail and attacked quickly and accurately from there. C14 was easy and I got there just before someone else, so now I had to hustle in to stay ahead up the hill to C15 and into the finish. That is the most tired I've been at the end of an orienteering race, and this despite such a poor performance. I hope I can handle the Hudson Highlander in 2 weeks! 

After getting into the car to rush off for the Bills game (missed over half of the first quarter), I noticed my sock was blood-soaked. Yep, that fall onto a rock on the way to C1 had drawn blood halfway up my shin - right where Walt's infection started, the infection that caused him to miss the whole weekend (well, except Sunday lunch).

9/17 - DVOA Night-O at Hickory Run (part of DVOA Training Weekend) - Advanced Course (map; results)

Ran most of the first leg getting away from the camp, but then had to walk most of the next 3 legs, since I was on compass bearing thru the woods, with not much visibility or many strong checkpoints. The last 4 controls were dominated by road running and were generally easy to find - although C6 cost me a lot of time by appearing to be hung too far northwest of the circle. 

My past night-O experience was mostly on/near trails, so this was a nice adventure.

9/10 - ROC ROGAINE at Rattlesnake Hill - 6-hour (map; results)

Nate and I competed in the 6-hour category at the Rattlesnake Hill Rogaine. On the way down, we planned to cover 18K (straight line distance) in the 6 hours. When the maps were handed out, we started to piece together a loop, and it happened to add up to exactly 18K. We executed pretty well, but made a decision to skip 2 controls for 78 pts, as we were running just a few minutes behind schedule, but we ended up jogging much of the rest, and wound up coming in 42 minutes early. Luckily the skip did not cost us a place (we managed to edge out Sergey by 7 points, and Rick and Linda by a single point), and we managed 2nd overall behind Pavel who picked up 1298 pts (we had 1107). I'll add some details, and our route when I have the map in front of me.

9/4 - DVOA Club Championship - Red Course (map; results)

Thanks to the re-strained achilles from yesterday's Alumni XC race, I was resigned to walking most of the course today.  Started OK, but cautious.  Then, C3 was bad (15 minutes bad).  There was no relocation point near the control to get back on the map in any precise manner, so eventually I made my way to a clearing not far from the Forestry camp, and was able to attack from there.  C4 was even worse.  I lost about 30 minutes wandering around rocky ground that did not seem to end.  Finally, I went back out to the trail, went up and down the straightaway to better determine the exact position, then went back into the woods.  Everything else went fairly smoothly.  I was even able to do a fair amount of running (OK, jogging) on the long, mostly trail route, to C8.  I went the long way around to C11, and heard footsteps behind me in the parking lot, so I jog/limped very quickly up to the control and on to the finish.

Nate did fairly well on Yellow (I think he was first, but no Yellow results on the web yet), then he made his first try at Orange - zipped thru 3 controls before struggling on C4 and bailing - C4 was at a stream junction, normally easy, but there was no water in either stream, so Nate couldn't find them.

8/20-21 - The Great... Great Mountain Rogaine - hosted by WCOC (map: part 1, part 2, results - basic, detailed)

First, I have to say that the event lived up to its name. The terrain was wonderful; the map was very well done for such a large area; there were many very interesting control locations. And the hospitality at the hash house was incredible. 

Nate (my 13-year-old son) and I had no intention of staying out all night; however, we were hoping to find a way to do 3 loops - a Saturday "day" loop, a short night loop, and a Sunday "day" loop. With the hash house centrally located, we thought there may be a good chance of that; however, once we got the map, it became clear that there was a lot of overhead associated with a trip to the HH, so we decided to just do 2 loops. Saturday went almost precisely as planned: we did a clockwise loop around the northeast corner of the map, and picked up 14 controls in under 8 hours. We did have an early problem: we took a bearing to head to our second control (86), went merrily on our way, until we didn't see an intermediate hilltop; we trudged on anyway, and when we had gone the right distance, the terrain was WAY off what we expected. Another look at the map revealed a blue line running 14 degrees to the left of north. Oh, that would be one of the magnetic north lines, huh? After correcting for our error, we quickly found the control. Our other 20-minute mistake was heading to C66. We got to a pond behind a school, and took a bearing to the control that was only 120m away, no luck. Try again. No. OK, let's try from the bend in this clearing southwest of the pond. Dead On! Not sure why the two attack points sent us in such different directions. C84 was the control of the day - had to climb a 3-story stone tower at the top of a 16-contour (160m) climb.

Day 2 of the Rogaine: Nate and I planned to be on the road by 5:30 - there were 10 controls that we could probably grab. I got up at 4:50 (is it legal to sleep for almost 6.5 hours during a 24-hour Rogaine?), but several showers and 1 quick downpour dampened our spirits and pace, so we didn’t leave until 6:12, thinking the rain had just ended. Nope - a half mile down the trail, we got one more brief downpour to make sure we were wet. The late start pretty much ruled out getting the 70 and 80 point controls down south, so we decided to also bag the 20 and 30 point controls that were partway down there, and just focus on 6 controls. The first 2 went smoothly, but then we really struggled on C49 - it took 53 minutes for us to contour around and up to a beautiful open spur that just "had" to be the control site, discover it wasn't, and then try to figure out whether we were too high, or too low (we finally figured out that the open spur was specifically called out as a form line on the map - duh). We were back in at 10:20, and got to watch all of the troopers who stayed out all night file in. There's no way we could have done that. We did manage to score 1150 points which was good for 8th place (3rd male!), but nowhere near the 1660 racked up by the winners, or the 1400 that Tim's team scored. Control of the day was 44 - we had quite a climb to make it up the rock piles to the peak; also, we happened to run into Walt & Patty here - they had some stuff I could use to clean up the cut on my elbow sustained when I slipped down and off a wet moss-covered rock after leaving the previous control. 

Route: 77-86-41-78-65-35-47-84-66-48-29-67-60-79-eat/drink/sleep at HH-70-87-49-88-44-68-home

8/13/05 - ROC 2-hour Score-O at Black Creek Park (map; results)

Fairly smooth sailing for the first hour: 13 controls - made it to the water stop (rest room sink) at 68 min. and then trouble hit - major problems finding #76 - had to be careful going to #80 (on a small strip of land in the middle of a swamp), so by the time I got to #72, I only had about 15 min. to get back, and a long way to run. Didn't dare try to pick up any of the 6 nearby controls on the way back. Ended up 70 pts behind Gil and 60 behind Sergey.

At long last - a local victory on the top course of the day!  It's only slightly diminished by the fact that Gil, Sergey and Tim were all working the meet and didn't compete.  Didn't adjust well to the map scale and messed up pretty bad going to XX.  Then I had big trouble going to XX, I could not read the vegetation on the map and translate it to what was in the field (perhaps they didn't correlate?) - went brute force until I saw the stairs near the creek.  Made it across Blossom for a few controls before I had to REALLY hustle back - making the cutoff by 1 second.

It was HOT out there.  Having only run about 9 times in the last 6 weeks made it a tough go.  Can't yet go full speed on the hamstring, but can keep a decent effort up.  Fun course: ran along base of MCWA building on the way to 8, where I got yelled at by the softball players; hopped a fence to get to 20.  Couldn't find 16 - it was not on the trail indicated, it was on the trail to the west, so I went to 7, then came back to check again before giving up.  Probably didn't take an optimal route thru the woods, but the controls were close enough together - just had small bobbles on 19 & 11.

6/25/05 - CNYO ROGAINE XV at Sugar Hill State Recreation Area (map coming soon - in 3 parts; results: xls, pdf)

Nate and I did the 12-hour version of the CNYO ROGAINE. After the maps were handed out, we planned out two loops, including an optional extension on the first, if we were staying on track. We went out from noon to 8:27pm, then back out from 9:20 to 11:07pm, in the dark.

We had multiple problems with our first, simple, control. I had never been on a 1:30K map, and did not have a feel for distances. This was our first non-orienteering map, so we also did not know what to expect in terms of what would be missing. We accidentally started out on an unmapped trail, took some time to relocate, then had to head most of the way back to the start to reload. Then, after forking onto the correct minor trail, we wound up on the wrong fork when the trails came close together again. So, we decided to skip the first control - not the start we were looking for!

After that, things went much more smoothly for awhile. We did several controls that were not far from trails, and pace counting is amazingly accurate and easy when you are walking on trails. I forgot to pack a second bottle of Gatorade for each of us, so our quart apiece did not last long enough. We needed water badly enough that we abandoned our search for a 60-point control because we thought we needed water more than the points - little did we know that we would finish 50 points behind the winners...

We then went through another nice stretch of controls on the way back to the hash house, arriving very close to our planned time (most of the miss was due to the 12 minutes we spent unsuccessfully looking for the control card that Nate dropped).

After hanging out and eating for almost an hour, we decided to venture out for a few night-time controls. It took 3 passes along a trail to spot the reflector on the first (easy) control. That did not inspire confidence in our next leg, which was to include a 400m approach on a bearing through the woods. The sometimes heavy undergrowth and dense pockets of trees that we could not see from more that 10-15m away made estimating distance tough. I also lost track of the hundreds place in my head, so when we reached a reentrant, we were at 375m, and I was thinking 275, so it couldn't be the right reentrant. So, we kept going, but got to our catching feature early, realized the mistake, but had no desire to retrace our steps for 100m through the junk, thus abandoning another 60-pointer. We decided to cut our loop short and just grab one more control (which we absolutely spiked!), and head in.

The event was a lot of fun. Nate held out amazingly well (he's just turned 13, after all) - we must have covered at least 23 miles.

6/19/05 - ROC Meet at Camp Pinewood - Red Course (map; results)

Since I had a bum hamstring, I let Tim follow me around the course for his first orienteering effort.  Lost a lot of time because I could not run the trails hard, and there were several legs with some trail running.  Nate struggled a bit on his Yellow course, so I ended up shadowing Zach on White after I finished.

6/4/05 - ROC Meet at Webster Park - Red Course (map; results)

Destroyed my hamstring on the way to 3 - caught my trailing foot on a log (right on a trail), and WAY overextended when landing off balance on my lead foot.  Should have dropped out, but stupidity ruled and I limped my way thru the whole course.

5/22/05 - ROC Bike-/Canoe-/Score-O at Mendon Ponds Park (map; results)

Stayed on foot the whole way, and did quite well.

5/7/05 - ROC Meet at Durand Eastman Park - Long Orange Course (map; results)

Would have had a shot at Gil, except for a MAJOR mistake looking for one control near the golf course.

5/1/05 - West Point A Meet (Day 2) at Long Mountain (map; splits; Overall Results)

4/30/05 - West Point A Meet (Day 1) at Bull Pond (map; splits)

4/9/05 - Icebreaker at Mendon Ponds - Red Course (map; results)

4/3/05 - Classic at Flying Pig A-Meet

4/2/05 - US Short Course Championship at Flying Pig A-Meet

4/1/05 - Sprint at Flying Pig A-Meet