okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Crazy idea of the day
What about having races where the organizers don't reveal the map scale in advance and don't use a "normal" scale? Instead of knowing, for example, that the race would be on a 1:10,000 map, you'd get a map at the starting line that would be something between, say 1:7,500 and 1:12,500. Maybe it'd be 1:9127, just some randomly selected scale.
I was thinking this would reward map reading a bit more than some of the more mechanical techniques (like pace counting or cheating with a GPS). You'd have to tune your measures of distance while you were on the clock.
