Note
J-J's Ten (plus one) Memorable Orienteering Experiences List, #1
Inspired by PG's Top Ten List, I decided to go though my own orienteering history and pick out ten notable races. I actually came up with eleven, but the first one is kind of just a footnote (with no map), and another is a race I didn't technically run, so it's close enough to ten. And they're not necessarily my best results (though some are), but they feel like they were significant events, thus the title of the list.
We start with...
Some Army Base, probably Massachusetts, 10/20/1979
I don’t have the map from my first point-to-point orienteering course. I had done a group score-O a year earlier in high school, then in my freshman year in college I signed up for a seminar called Land Navigation, taught by the ROTC department. It was in that class that I learned all the important things about orienteering from Sergeant Bell, like plotting coordinates, intersection, resection, modified resection, etc.
We had two field trips in that class. The first one was to some army base, where we were piggybacking onto an event that the ROTC upperclassmen were putting on for the plebes (or whatever you call them at MIT) and I don’t even know where (I fell asleep on the bus). Seems logical that it would have been Devens, but I’ve looked all over Devens on maps and GoogleEarth, and I can’t find anywhere that matches what I remember. When we got there, there was a place where 100 m was marked out on the ground, and they had us calibrate our pace counts. Then they handed out compasses, nice big army lensatic ones. But based on my experience in high school, I had gone out the day before and bought myself a Silva Polaris.
They told us to form groups of three, and I was with Scott Minneman, who lived in my dorm, and a guy named Ed. The advice from Sergeant Bell was that one of us should read the map, one should read the compass, and the third should pace count. I had the fancy compass, and Scott said he’d handle the map, so Ed agreed to do the counting. We were the third group in line, and we watched the first two groups heading out across the field in front of us, each with one person burying his nose in the map, another staring intently at the compass, and the third blindly counting paces.
Scott and I looked at the map, and it was obvious to us that the first control was on the hill that we could see at the far end of the field. We nodded to each other, yeah, we got this, and Ed looked at us and said, you guys aren’t planning to run are you? We looked back at him and said, of course we are.
The field had a bunch of ridges in it, perpendicular to our direction of travel, that I think weren’t shown on the map. When they said go, Scott and I took off, with Ed starting out pacing 1, 2, 3, 4, hey, wait for me! We crested the first rise and realized that this was a shooting range and the ridges had concrete drop-offs on the back side with machines behind them for raising targets. So we detoured to the left side of the field, ran along the edge, and got to the control on the hill just as the first of the two groups ahead of us was cruising past it.
The course was maybe something like a Yellow, I don’t know what the length was, but there were five controls. The map was a B&W slightly marked up USGS, with things like trails and stone walls added. In the middle of the course we stopped because we thought we should be at the control, having attacked from the end of a stone wall. One of the cadets who was running the event, and who was stationed in the woods to provide assistance, came over and said, here, you must be lost, let me help you. I quickly realized that the wall wasn’t mapped quite right, it was either longer or shorter than the map showed, and we grabbed the map back from him and went to the control.
We crushed that course. Sprinting in to the finish, we slammed our punchcard (actually a card that we had to write letters on) down on the table, and the cadets in charge of the finish said, oh, giving up? We said no, we’re not giving up, we’re done! They looked at the card, and realized that we were done, and they seemed astonished.
At the following week’s class, Sergeant Bell congratulated everyone on kicking the cadets’ butts. Yeah. It wasn’t everyone, it was me and Scott, with Ed in tow. And I thought, yeah, this is fun, I think I’d like to do a lot more of it.