okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Today's race
I ran a short race at Prairie Center today. Check out the map with my routes. The course is 5.1 km and the map is 1:7,500.
The area is a nature park near Olathe. The forest is thick and thorny. The open areas are prairie grasses. The grass ranges from about knee high to over my head. The deep grass makes running a lot tougher and gives you a chance to think about some different route choices. For example, on 7-8 it wouldn't cost much time to use the trails that go right or left of the straight line. I'm sure my route is fastest, but I don't think you'd lose more than 30 or 40 seconds running all the way around on the trails.
The map is fine. The area is quite simple and in places the map is a bit over general. But, overall the map is quite easy to use. Improving the map would involve adding some more vegetation details in the forest (some of the light green isn't too terrible and some of it should be mapped darker green). I'm not sure if there is a good way to show the runnability of the deep grass. Probably not.
Possum Trot O' Club used this event as a clinic for people who have little or no experience organizing events. Everything went very well -- no misplaced controls, no controls hidden, no problems with the courses.
Overall a really nice day of orienteering. Prairie Center is always fun (more fun that it looks), but it ain't exactly great terrain.
posted by Michael |
6:58 PM
