PTOC hosted an event at Wyandotte Countly Lake Park today (11/11). My observations:

It was cold. The temp was a bit above freezing -- but it felt colder.

The event attracted a number of local "adventure racers." There is a local club (KC Adventure Racers) and at a club meeting earlier during the week, they gave the PTOC event some publicity.

Running the red course was a lot of work. The controls were quite easy -- but there were a lot of hills to go up and down. There were a couple of legs that gave you a chance to work really hard as you, for example, ran across the dam.

-- Spike (meglin@juno.com), November 11, 2000

Answers

I was greatly disappointed in how hard it was to find the meet site. While it was announced in online newsletters, I would expect the direction arrows to be helpful. They weren't. I spent at least 20 minutes trying to find the meet site.

Also, I was disappointed in the placements of the controls in relation to the master maps. I gave up after spending over 20 minutes trying to find the third control. After hearing from others where it was, I went back and found the marker. It was outside of the circle I had drawn from the mastermap.

In all, I found myself wondering how orienteering survives. I brought Bobbi and Kenton to the meet. I was a long drive for all of us. From how things went, I decided to not spend the time trying to go to Monkey Mountain.

-- Fritz (fpmenninger@hotmail.com), November 13, 2000.

The Wyandotte meet was OK. The weather was really cold, and of course, there's always the hills out there ready to sap what little leg strength I have. The courses were easy, but it's hard to set very challenging course due to a large network of trails and roads, along with buildings and the lake. I, too, had problems with control placement. The master maps seemed to circle the feature in one area, while the control was actually placed higher or lower. At least they were always on the correct feature. I just learned to look up and down the whole reentrant, for example, no matter where on the reentrant I had circled.

It was fun to see the adventure racers in the woods. They are much fitter than I, but I got an ego boost when I passed them easily due to better navigation skills. Mike took 47 minutes on the red course. One of the ARs, who spent 2.5 hours on the red course, said he "couldn't imagine how someone could do it that fast". I had to laugh, because it reminded me of something Mike said many years ago. We were at a SLOC meet, and someone asked him how he could do the course so fast. He gave a short answer, and we walked away. Then Mike turned to me and said "Whenever people ask me how I could have done a course in 47 minutes, I always want to turn to them and say 'How could you possibly have taken 2 hours to do that course??!!!??'"

-- Mary (maprunner@juno.com), November 13, 2000.

Your comment ["Whenever people ask me how I could have done a course in 47 minutes, I always want to turn to them and say 'How could you possibly have taken 2 hours to do that course??!!!??'] made me smile a bit. I had my kids at both Saturday and Sunday's meets. We have moved from white to yellow this year. My kids were thrilled 'cause we broke our hour and a half record on Sunday. It ends up being more of a stroll with picture taking, snack and water break and throwing rocks and sticks into the water. As we were leaving Monkey Mountain on Sunday another Nebraskan had overheard my son mention this and said quite loudly "An hour and a half on a yellow course?!" Luckily my kids didn't pick up his tone and my son heartily agreed with pride.

We had a good time. I'm heading down for the December meets with my girl scouts again this year. We didn't make it over to KC for the Sunday meet (Possum Trot day) last year 'cause the girls wanted to stay at the camp where we were staying and play in the snow instead. We're going to try for both of them this year and I'm looking forward to it (even if a couple of the girls aren't too thrilled).

Robin

-- Robin Graham (Robgra@aol.com), November 22, 2000.