Discussion: Between the lakes

You did get through! I am impressed.

Not sure when the A meet was at Gay City. I was thinking longer ago, but on reflection, probably 1999 or 2000. I was the course setter. It got to be the day of the meet and going through between the lakes was a reasonable route choice, so I hustled down there with loppers early in the morning and cleared the path. It had been mapped in the winter when it was perfectly passable, but by late spring when the A meet happened it was all overgrown with nasty stuff. I assume it hasn't been properly manicured since, so perhaps difficult to punch through.

It was possible, but certainly not optimal. My many years of training in the Yorkshire Dales pay off for moments like this...

Charlie - That was the 1998 Troll Cup. My first turn at Meet Director. Still have panic attacks thinking about that chase start on Sunday, but I never had any worries about your course setting. Although, you did provide the tempting last leg that led Steve Fluegel to his infamous swim across the lake.

I never imagined that anyone would actually do that. Steve is probably the only guy (excellent swimmer, slow runner) for whom it would even be a feasible route choice. But it was a hot day.

The only course setting glitch I remember was something I didn't figure out until I was hanging controls. There was a common control on Red and Orange. Pretty easy to deal with these days, what with Purple Pen and the like. Whatever the technology at the time, these courses were set up independently, and the common control ended up high in a certain re-entrant for R and low in that same re-entrant for O. A moment of panic, but I just hung it in the middle, and nobody ever said a thing about it.

Another thing that was interesting about the course setting: Clint was mapping contemporaneously with the course setting, and I encouraged him to put the big hemlocks on the map as lone trees. In the late winter when I was course setting, they were big beacons and made it pretty easy to navigate around. By the time of the meet, everything was leafed out and they were almost invisible in the forest.