Dan hosted an informal OK event at James A. Reed today (1/6).

Dan used the park's map and set courses that emphasized route choice (relatively long legs) and let you stick to the trails. That's good because the woods looked very thick.

The park map showed roads, trails, parking lots, ponds, streams, and woods. It didn't show contours, but that wasn't much of a problem because the area is quite flate. The map was a bit rough, but certainly adequate for the event.

I'm not sure how many people participated or what the results were. Maybe Dan can post the results?

-- Michael (meglin@juno.com), January 06, 2002

Answers

In Spike's blog he talks about "easy" courses. Dan's long course had 5 controls, long legs, easy point locations - yet, one can bungle it. Well, my Sunday run was a typical blow-an-easy-course run. The map wasn't a top-notch O'map (it wasn't even an O'map) so mentally you had to be adjusting all the time - treeline is further down, trail actually starts here, etc. Going from 2-3, I had already gotten the hang of the weird scale and making adjustments. I was, up til then, avoiding the "easy" trap. I ran along the east edge of the pond, keeping track of where the peninsula was in the middle of the pond, and pace counting. Then the open area to the right before turning west didn't match. Got to the next pond (it was the right one), but I thought I had already gone too far and was at the next one north and went back toeards 2 looking for the trail across the arm of the 1st pond. 5 min boom. There was enough correct information to have avoided the error - I took the wrong bit of info (open area didn't match) and panicked. At the "wrong" pond, I could have looked at the shape of the pond to confirm it was the right one. I was within 150m of the control before losing more time. Also probably was running too hard along this stretch. Great workout and a good course. No course is ever too easy.

-- mean gene (gmw@ku.edu), January 07, 2002.

Spike wrote:
Maybe Dan can post the results?

If "Dan" has the results, then surely he can post them! Or is "Dan" going for the haplessly hopeless (a.k.a. DVOA) standard?

-- Mook (everett@psi.edu), January 09, 2002.