Discussion: Orienteering nightmares

Has anyone else had this one before - it's the night before a major race and you haven't started planning the courses yet?

At West Point I've spent a day looking for a control on the wrong mountain. It was a nightmare but I was not asleep as I not-asleep walked and hiked and ran and climbed all over the wrong mountain.

Since I organize (direct, design) more than my fair share of events, I have a lot of organizational nightmares. Courses not planned, controls not set, controls set in the wrong place, access gates locked, forgot to print maps, people yelling at me, negative Yelp AP comments, etc.

If I'm having a nightmare about an actual race, it's usually the same one. I'm having an amazing run. I'm fit and fast, navigating perfectly. But I keep falling down and can't get up, like I've got vertigo or something. Sometimes it's in familar terrain, but other times it's in completely made-up terrain, too.

Seeing it written on a wall of
this cabin
"You will never reach the finish line... You will stay here with us forever".
BTW, it is an actual control location from my last weekend race.

I have. It involves the local club asking me to acquire an OCAD license (which at the time cost 600 USD, and at the time I was unemployed and money was tight), and do pro bono mapping when the map delivered by the paid mapper was a failure, or the event fails.

A true nightmare indeed; one that will never be forgotten.

I've definitely had many orienteering dreams. Not sure if I can recall one that would qualify as a nightmare.

A lot of contemporary OAWA people might laugh at me contributing, given my current curious fringe dwelling, somewhat love hate relationship with the short sport but I have the perfect storm real life course setting nightmare.

Many many years ago, in a different life, I set a standard orienteering event, called a Come and Try It or CATI event in an area now referred to as Cooralong Brook - some 80 mins drive from home. All was well until the day before the event when it was decided to hang the controls in the afternoon. This was in the days before (hang on to your fuzzy white beard simmo) controllers. I got all the way down to the assembly area in a nice little picnic area about 2.30pm, opened the boot of the car to discover, to my horror, that I had left the controls behind. Once I had recovered from the spontaneous bowel evacuation, I did the math (using toes as well as fingers) and realised that the round trip home to pick up the dropped ball as it were would mean I would not get back to the event site until near on dark.

The decision was made to return home with my tail between my legs, flog myself incessantly endlessly for the evening to celebrate my monumental brain fade and then return to the scene of the crime the next morning, the day of the event, at sparrows and hang all the controls before the event started. It was an insane, comical morning with the last of the controls being hung a mere 5 minutes before the first starters arrived at the control sites.

Amazingly, only one control was hung in the wrong location. This was in the day before orienteers got their teeth into protests and juries and course cancellations - hard to imagine in this day and age, hey?

Oh, and to top it all off, when I got to the assembly area the morning of the event, before dawn, I discovered to my horror, that a local bikie chapter had descended on the picnic area the night before for a drunken orgy and were sleeping off their excesses. There were kegs, bottles and beer cans, Harleys, patched leather bikies and their moles scattered all over the picnic area wherever they had fallen or had been tossed. Tip toeing around them and praying to the almighty that they might rise and disappear before Joe Public turned up were futile activities and there were some VERY nervous conversations with some sore headed, irate motor cycle enthusiasts as it was explained to them the inevitability of the coming tide of cheerful, family orientated, seemingly tree hugging perambulators.

Good times!

How could their moles be scattered all over the place? Wouldn't that have been messy and bloody to boot! What were they doing - group surgery?

Actually courses are only cancelled for misplaced controls at big scale events these days, not on the local scene :-)

Weirdly I had a MTBO nightmare last night when I turned up to the start line with my bike but without the team uniform, cleated shoes and probably other gear. The starter decided to disqualify me from the race due to not wearing the uniform although my mum turned up in time with my shoes, then I was in the wrong start lane and it was some weird race involving obstacles anyway instead of navigation.

Ah TT, your seeming naivety is endearing and your humour wicked. :)

Why arent you two out training or have you done so and I have slept in longer than usual? :)

We were getting ready to head out for a paddle then some running. Tomorrow is cycling day! Nothing quite so long as today's efforts though.

It's interesting that some of these nightmare stories are actual dreams that are nightmares, and others are nightmare-ish events that seemed to have actually happened...