Training Log Archive: hamlet

Event: QOC Patapsco Granite
 

Hanging the last of the controls

Granite event. I was the course setter, so any running I did was fixing things that went wrong. To begin with, Mike Dickey, the first runner on the blue course, came back saying that a control was missing, and it was a control I remembered hanging very clearly. So I ran into the woods with him (really hard to keep up with him) and saw that the control was geuinely stolen: and whoever did it is apparently afraid of knots (even extremely simple ones) because they just cut the strings of the flag and took it, and they snatched the epunch box off of the plastic bracket that was left there. Really weird, but thankfully when leaving I had a feeling something had happened to the control, so I grapped an extra box and flag in case, so I hung those out there. Fun stuff.

When Mike finished the blue, he told me that the last control on that couurse was ~20 meters off, so I went there to fix it but the ruin it was supposed to be on was more of a pit full of boulders, and some people were telling me I shouldn't have hung it in the middle (and I agree- I was just not thinking properly and rushing to fix the location before the next runner came).

Then at the end one of the control pickup people said that she couldn't find one of the controls, that it just genuinely wasn't there. Thing is, she had it on her course, and she's a better orienteer than me, so I really do believe her- so yeah, I'll probably send my dad out sometime to check if he can find it, and if not, well it's frustrating if two controls were stolen during my meet.