Training Log Archive: TomNIn the 1 days ending Nov 30, 2013:
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Saturday Nov 30, 2013 #
Orienteering 2:01:59 [3] *** 8.0 km (15:15 / km) +250m 13:11 / km
15c shoes: Inov8 Oroc 280
Crow's Nest Sneak Preview. Tom S. and Greg L. arranged this early orienteering opportunity at the Crow's Nest Natural Area Preserve in Stafford County Va. This is the state's newest land acquisition, and is not yet open to the public. The map is a work in progress, with good contours but almost no field checking. The park ranger was extremely helpful, opening the gate for us, giving us a little speech on the history of the land, and going out to eat with some of us afterwards. I get the impression that most of his job these days involves keeping people out, so it must have been a nice change for him.
The format was a 2-hour Score-O, 20 controls with even weighting, roughly 11K and over 300m climb to get them all. It's mostly steep and deeply carved ridge-and-reentrant terrain, dropping down to the river on 3 sides. Many old and disappearing roads and rides, mostly as yet unmapped. Otherwise, very few signs of human habitation.
It was initially disorienting to leave the road with so sparse a map, but it turned out my contours-only navigation was solid. Maybe it worked for me because I often have trouble keeping multiple dimensions in play, and here there was only the one.
In any event, I had no errors until the very end, when all I had to do was run up the mapped road to the finish, with all the time in the world to do it, and hopefully enough left over to get one of the controls at the very end before finishing. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. I hit an old unmapped road instead, and ran along it a very long way before realizing it wasn't the right one, and by then I was hopelessly out of contact. I finally happened to spot the park ranger, who was out for a walk, and he pointed me back the right way. My 15-minute run-in time was all used up by then and I came back in just short of 2 minutes overtime.
My route: 150-148-147-145-144-143-142-141-140-138-149-136-135-133-134.
The format was a 2-hour Score-O, 20 controls with even weighting, roughly 11K and over 300m climb to get them all. It's mostly steep and deeply carved ridge-and-reentrant terrain, dropping down to the river on 3 sides. Many old and disappearing roads and rides, mostly as yet unmapped. Otherwise, very few signs of human habitation.
It was initially disorienting to leave the road with so sparse a map, but it turned out my contours-only navigation was solid. Maybe it worked for me because I often have trouble keeping multiple dimensions in play, and here there was only the one.
In any event, I had no errors until the very end, when all I had to do was run up the mapped road to the finish, with all the time in the world to do it, and hopefully enough left over to get one of the controls at the very end before finishing. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. I hit an old unmapped road instead, and ran along it a very long way before realizing it wasn't the right one, and by then I was hopelessly out of contact. I finally happened to spot the park ranger, who was out for a walk, and he pointed me back the right way. My 15-minute run-in time was all used up by then and I came back in just short of 2 minutes overtime.
My route: 150-148-147-145-144-143-142-141-140-138-149-136-135-133-134.