Discussion: Running off the map

I'm curious to know if you are allowed to take a route choice that goes off the map? I cannot find if this is a rule on the IOF rules page.

I don't think there is a rule against competitors doing this, but they would be taking a huge risk that there is not a significant barrier such as a deep gully, big hill, huge cliff, a motorway, extensive thicket of blackberries, private property, etc.

There is probably an unwritten rule for course planners to avoid tempting competitors to go off the map, especially for events under IOF jurisdiction.

I have a vague memory of someone taking an off-map route at WOC some years ago, but it wouldn't have been a good look for IOF if the person had won.

I believe it was at WOC in Norway there was a road on the edge of the map on the long and part of it got cut off someone bailed to the road on a long leg and hoped it was the same road and carried on which I believe it did

The problem with "running off the map" is that you have, by definition, "lost contact" with the map. And must "relocate." Which may be difficult without a distinct "catching feature."

I am super-careful whenever I select a route that takes me close to the edge of the map. I want iron-clad attack points to make sure that there will be no question whether I'm on or off the map.

Iron is heavy. Just sayin'.

Rules or no rules, don't run off the map. There be dragons.

Coincidentally in yesterday's event in the ACT this happened. The edge of the map was a fence and there was unmapped farmland on the other side, which a competitor used rather than running along the fence line, which had pockets of thick bush, rocks, etc that slowed up (at least) one of the other competitors.

Which is why Biddy raised the question...if the land in question was privately-owned and not belonging to the same landowner as the mapped area, then that competitor was trespassing!

...but if it's not marked OOB, then at least they can only be arrested (and/or shot), not DSQ.

There can be other advantages to running off the map. Back in the mid 70s a Canadian orienteer running at the Swiss 6-day happened to unknowingly run off the map. When he found a farmer who would show him where they were on the map the gentleman pointed to the air a few cm outside the east edge of the map.
The advantage? The farmer insisted that they share some beer before he would take the (un)lucky Canadian back to the competition center (aka arena).

Oops, didn't notice that Biddy was from Aus. I thought it was highly coincidental that this should come up now. I just saw farmland and figured it wasn't mapped for a reason. Of course I wasn't meant to be that far west, having overshot the control I was looking for (I was also on the wrong spur, which didn't help).

tRicky!!! Biddly is famous! (and lovely)

I haven't done this in weeks! But I did have a leg the first weekend of this month where the map was cropped too close to the course, and I intentionally went off the edge of the paper to avoid the worst of the thorny steep stuff, all the while thinking that the best route might be even further off the map. I was not impressed. I was pretty confident that I wasn't going to be trespassing, though, since I knew that the land ownership was the same all the way down to the road at the bottom of the hill.

OK, so next map I make will have OOB all around the outside!

Of course that shouldn't be necessary Simmo! But the national rules round here (patterned on the IOF rules) are conspicuously silent on the matter. Even if it was there (perhaps it is:-)) it would be unfind-able in amongst all the stuff that relates to organiser obligations.

The rogaine rules (patterned on the IRF ones) are a little better. They separate out the competitor stuff into a readable couple of pages. And they hint at the map boundaries by saying the organiser's map is the only one allowed to be used. But a lawyer could driver a bulldozer through these words: "The course” means anywhere a team travels during the time of the rogaine...

Give me a bulldozer and I will drive it through your lawyer (and any others that I find along the way or even out of the way).

Marking outside a boundary as OOB is definitely an option if anyone thinks (a) a route choice off the map may be a viable option and (b) taking it would create issues with landowner permissions. Of course, competitors may well see viable route choices that the course-setter doesn't even consider...

My first thought looking at leg 1 from the weekend was "I wonder if it's farmland on the other side of that fence?" I would have headed that way and hoped that it was.

You could have run through the control descriptions.

Check out Bruce's route well off the map!

Plus carrying a GPS in a WRE, tut tut.

(Richard, fix your tags)

Richard wins the prize for correctly identifying the protagonist.

Always lovely

Bruce's route was the one that jumped out at me. Not having been to the map, there's probably a better way, unless the forest is awful, but the only other things that stuck out to me were gigantic hills, which I prefer to avoid before the first control.

That was a good idea. My legs had had it before I'd even done half the course, mainly from going over all the hills I could find.

This isn't my story, and the two people involved are occasional contributors to Attackpoint, so if they see this and recognize themselves, they can correct me if I got any details wrong.

The story takes place in the early 1980s, I think, a bit before my day. The meet was on an unusual map (here), consisting of a large sandy hill in otherwise flat terrain. At the course review on Saturday night, the day's winner described one leg that was near the edge of the map. He said he had done some of the fieldwork when the map was originally made, and although it was just white paper after the last contour line at the bottom of the hill, it was actually accurate, in that it was just flat open forest there, so that was the route that he took. One teenage competitor who was in attendance had a similar leg on Sunday, and took the advice. He found out that the first guy had actually been kidding, and what was down there was a dense tangle of fallen trees.

I already half debated about posting this story, but since JJ brought it up, here it goes.

I'm rather sure that I am part of the story, since the only other mapper was not at the event. I will confirm part of the story, but not all of it, and add what I thought was the real punch line.

Yes, I competed in an "A" meet on my own map, Mission Hill. (it was not the debut event for this fantastic, but underused terrain). Yes, I intentionally took the edge-of-map route on a leg, going eastbound along the southern edge. I probably spoke about this leg, and I certainly wasn't kidding. I have no memory that anyone had trouble the next day using this plausible route, nor was I aware of any unmapped thick vegetation along this edge, and would consider this a mapping shortcoming if it wasn't shown in some way along this lower edge, which should have been considered part of the map's playing field.

At least to me, the real story was that I actually lost contact with the map, running too fast along this supposedly simple route, and failed to cut back up into the real terrain when I should have. Things didn't make sense, possibly because there was some contour detail in the supposedly flat area, but I kept going, until all of a sudden I was standing atop a steep hillside, facing eastward, overlooking a huge pond below. Well that helped, it wasn't Lake Superior (just off the map to the north), and most APers could probably tell by now that I was looking at Monocle Lake, but it took an embarrassing amount of additional time, running along this eastern edge, until I put myself completely back on the map. I had clearly had been well off the SE corner of the map, getting lost on my own fieldwork, probably done only 3(?) years earlier.

Yep, you are indeed one of the people involved, though I had never heard the story from you. Now we'll see if James Baker weighs in to see if I got his side of it right. (My memory was that he thought it was pretty funny.)

(And man-oh-man, if there were ever another meet there, I'd make a serious effort to get to it, having missed my chance back in the day.)

I've once run off a map (not on purpose) and ended up in a different country - on a map on the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia (as it then was) on the JWOC training camp in 1991. Probably only a two-minute mistake, too. (Interestingly, not only was there no fence, there was no evidence that there'd ever been one - I guess it would have been a bit of a waste of time crossing illegally from East Germany to Czechoslovakia or vice versa).

My other notable running-off-maps effort was to run off both ends of the old Honeysuckle Creek map (near Canberra) on the same day.

I've only run off the map once, right at the start of an event near Perth. I've never heard the end of it. I hadn't really been orienteering long at that stage and it was a horrible map so I was probably better off not running on it.

At least I haven't run off an urban map by crossing a major road like some others I could name...

I've also ridden off a MTBO map twice in the same event on my first sprint race, in Vic. The big problem was in trying to relocate but couldn't since the feature I was at was not on the map and yet I somehow rode back onto the map then off it again.

Early in my career I was on a very technical map, and found myself completely lost, and after that I was still lost but in a pack of more experienced orienteers, all milling around trying to figure out where we were. Eventually we found a large, distinctive cliff, and we couldn't find it on the map, so one of the crowd (a very good orienteer who often posts here) said, "Well, this isn't on the map, and that means we're not on the map!". (But none of us were doing it on purpose.) I think there were five finishers out of 20 starters on M21 that day, and two of us were over three hours.

OTH - Late in my career, last Sunday, I went off the field checked portion of the map on to what the map indicated was private property though there was no evidence on the ground. There were contours on the map, few if any of the many cliffs, and I gradually figured contours could be useful in figuring my location. Guess that's why we keep doing this activity - to continue to make the same or new mistakes week after week.

I ran an event last week where the map had been cut _very_ close to the only real route to control #9:

http://tmsw.no/qr/show_map.php?user=terjem&map...

The main problem was all the extra unmapped paths that had been created by people living nearby, it lead one of my competitors to a 13 minute mistake.