Discussion: You Think You Had Problems!

Probably every meet director has bemoaned the little things that happen to keep EVERYTHING from going just right.
I came across this meet report by Walter Seigenthaler on the Carolina OK web site. COK is in the Charlotte NC area.
"All the planning for the meet went well; the master maps and clue sheets were printed by Thursday evening, all that was left was to put out the controls on Friday. When I turned off the I-85 on Friday morning, my “Life is Good” feeling suddenly changed, ahead of me I saw a big cloud of smoke appearing out of the woods. Is this coming out of Kings Mountain National Military Park? Is this a wildfire or are they doing a controlled burning? Driving into the park answered that question; it was controlled, or as they call it, prescribed burning. At the park office I was handed a map that showed the burn area. Some of my “Life is Good” feeling came back again, by pure coincidence I didn’t have any controls planned in the burn area. The only inconvenience would be for the Red course, they would have to go out to the road from #8 to #9 to get around the burn area, adding about 500 meters to the course. This route was one of the possible route choices to start with.

Well with that scare behind me I went out into the woods to set the controls and put out the water. It was a beautiful day with the temperature approaching 80 degrees – what is going on, it is still February.

By four o’clock the work planned for the day was complete, leaving the White controls for the morning.

At home I added the out of bound area onto the Green and Red master maps and I was ready to roll for the meet day – I thought. At about 8:40 that evening I got a call from Chris Revels, the Park Supervisor, telling me that they had an “over burn” and that he retrieved our control #105 before it got burned up. I knew right away that if the fire was close to #105, then #106 must be in the fire area already. There was nothing I could do about it at that time since I didn’t know the extent of the over burn, but I did print several notices, warning participants to stay out of any newly burned or still burning areas.

That night’s sleep was not the best, not knowing what to expect the next morning.

As I turned off the Interstate on Saturday morning, I saw the smoke lying in the valleys – quite a nice scene, but my “Life is Good” feeling did not come back. A check with the Park Supervisor revealed that the over burn was rather large and there were 4 Green and Red controls in the burning area. I was clearly instructed that nobody is allowed to enter the burning area, so it was time to redesign the Green and Red course. Putting two other controls out and using one of the Orange controls created acceptable courses and we were ready to go.

Latest O equipment: (photo of a toasted marshmell on a stick)
With this unanticipated course redesign things got a bit hectic, but thanks to the help of several club members we managed to keep most things under control.

The turnout for this event was one of the largest in club history; we had a total of 228 people and 92 starts. Obviously, the perfect weather was a large contributor to this great turnout"

wow

A couple of weeks before the 2002 World Masters Orienteering Championships I was in the offices of one of the local land managers (for reasons quite unrelated to orienteering). By pure chance I noted a computer screen with a map of the area for the event. On asking I was told that it was a planned burn. On further questioning it emerged the scheduled date was most likely the day of the event. It was a classic example of one office (the permits) and another (fire management) not communicating. Urgent negotiations commenced immediately.

Well-known, of course, is Day 2 of the 1989 US Team Trials, where the forest was on fire (started by lightning, mostly a ground fire, some bushes burning, but there's very little understory at Sebago and it didn't make it to the canopy). The meet staff included one professional fireman and a volunteer fireman, who felt that the situation was okay. The park staff said that the fire was all on the other side of the road, and I think there was some miscommunication -- they meant the small road running through the map, but the meet crew initially thought they meant the paved road that formed the northern border of the map. In any case, the meet went on, and there were legs that crossed the burned area. I crossed the line of flames four times, and one control was just a couple of meters from some laurel that was ablaze -- it was very hot when I was punching. Paul Bennett had a melted control hanging in his living room for years after that.

A small fire enveloped a control stand + flag + SI unit during a minor event following the Australian 3 Day carnival in Tasmania -Easter 2009. The early runners struggled to find the control stand because of its charred appearance but stoically punched the melted SI unit to find that it still worked.

Of course last minute problems for meet directors come in many forms. Last weekend I participated in a Virginia event called the Soggy Bottom Boys Rogaine. I was in the 3-hour version and the problem was very minor. A 40 mile-an-hour wind the day before apparently had blown away one of the flags placed along a beach. By meet time the flag was probably half way to Europe. The problems were larger for the six and twelve hour participants who did part of their rogaine on foot and part on bikes along usually quiet Virginia backroads. An e-mail sent by meet director Mark Montague explained: “My sincerest apologies for any of you who experienced some of the "odd" situations that occurred out on the big Claremont course. Chanco and SBB had an agreed arrangement for 3 months and then come Sat, the Camp Director forgot that and closed the camp to us. I'm working on the best and fairest way to consider those possible CPs there.” Then he added “ RE: Nutt Job Psycho in the red car near CP30, I am thankful no one was hurt in any way. I was told he was driving around the main roads looking for bikers to give a hard time to as well. Good news from all this is we won't be going near that Claremont area next year.”

Last minute problems are so trivial. They bother you only for, well, a minute. Consider the real problem we had at Barebones last year. We'd planned a race for up on Whistler mountain. We were scared already in November - eight MONTHS before the event - when Whistler mountain recorded its highest ever November snowfall. Then the snow just kept coming. We sat through the Olympics in misery as the whole world thought there was no snow in Whistler - but we just watched it falling and falling. The second highest snowfall in recorded history ;-( Then spring came and we were given false hope with a few nice warm weeks. But each day from April onwards we'd watch the snowline receding up the mountain oh so slowly - absolute agony. We'd study the webcams, examining in minute detail the appearance of any new bit of rock or ground from under the white snow. But the final coup de grace was delivered - to put us out of our misery - about three weeks before the event when the mountain staff looked at our map and said "there, just above this road, is a forty-foot snow drift".

This was a slow and painful disaster.

I'm always reminded of my friend Bill Jarvis, a chronic last-minute organizer, who would say that any problems you have are your own fault for planning in advance. If you wait until the last minute there will be no surprises ;-)

(we do not share this opinion)

As in Bill Jarvis, the future Alberta Cabinet Minister?

I was intrigued by the line at the end of the original post - 228 people, 92 starts. Is that the highest number of spectators at an orienteering event, ever?

People running in groups perhaps, Simmo?

The numbers? The 'bread and butter' of many orienteering meets in the south east US states seem to be groups of high school students participating as JROTC units. They seem to favour going out in groups of two, three or four. That was the case at Walter's meet. Most of the 228 participants were on the White and Yellow (easiest) courses.
AZ: I was up in the Whistler alpine meet terrain a few weeks ago. I thought to myself too bad a deal couldn't have been worked out with an outfitter and mountain staff to turn the Barebones meet in to a snowshoe event.

I love this misery poker - who's got the best worst story. I'll fold my hand saying "It was more comical than problematic"...

I had volunteered for, checked the map over the summer, and set an early evening sprint and night-O in a local park. Everything looked reasonable.

Until I arrived to setup the controls and discovered "Octoberfest" was already being setup. I think I knew this section of the park was used to hold the annual party, but didn't realize the extent of the wind-fencing used to cordon the crowds and such - nor that said fencing would be put up 8 weeks before the actual event...

The additional unmapped obstacles affected everyone equally, and we just insisted that for safety reasons people not try to climb over them...

I remember well the meet that ccsteve refers to ... quite an interesting situation for sure, having multiple unmapped, uncrossable obstacles!

Ooh, I just remembered that I had my own "panic" scenario as a Course Setter & Meet Director a few years ago:

Troy and I went to Black Forest Regional Park to confirm control locations and finalize our courses the weekend before an RMOC meet.

When we got there the following Friday afternoon to hang the flags for the next day's meet, we discovered that a new road had been cut through the park -- trees cut down, earth bull-dozed, etc. No one had warned us about that when we got our event permit.

Luckily it didn't affect any of our control locations; it was just a major un-made map correction we had to tell everyone about. What's much worse is that we haven't been able to use that map ever since...

(The road was the result of a years-long lawsuit that local home owners lost out on to an upscale home developer. A few years later the developer got dragged through the mud and forced out as HOA President due to alleged financial improprieties. Karma?)

A favorite horror story from Istanbul gave me one of my favorite Meet Director quotes. It was during the Istanbul 5 day a few years ago when heavy rains deluged the city and all of its surrounding forests. All competitors stay in the heart of Istanbul and load buses in front of the Hagia Sophia and these drive us to the events. Alex K (you think my last name is hard to pronounce??) was meet director and hopeful that despite the rain the race could go on. But when he arrived at the site early in the morning these hopes were washed away - the access bridge, clearly marked on the map, was no longer there. There was no safe way to cross what had been a small creek but was now a raging torrent. Alex got on his ever-present mobile phone and called to the city to cancel the buses. The other volunteers, not having been to the site, were full of suggestions, but Alex interrupted them with what is now my favorite go-to line when there simply are no more options: "This is not the time for debate." Used sparingly, it is a most effective phrase, and proves that even deepest clouds can have a tiny silver lining ;-)

I still am in awe of the Swiss WOC organizers who had to abandon their planned relay terrain three weeks before the race (I think it was because of blow-down) and created a new map with championship relay courses to World Championship standards in those three weeks. I am also still bitter that the public racers had to use the old map with all its errors ;-)

But my biggest nightmare is when I'm way behind schedule, its the night before the event, the printing needs to be done but the printer is broken, and I'm not sure who has all of the SI units. Luckly this really is a dream - I think a standard event organizer nightmare.

The US Night-O Champs in 2001 near Palm Springs ran into a serious hitch. The Night-O was sandwiched between two daytime B-meet races, and during the course of the Saturday race, the rangers, who had already granted permission for the event, reconsidered what it actually entailed and decided that the terrain for the night courses was out of bounds. (I think this may have had to do with not disturbing the native burros or something.) So, with a couple of hours of time available, the course setters whipped up new night-O courses on the remaining bit of terrain across the street. We all had to shiver in the dark for about an hour, as the start was delayed while frantic color photocopying took place downtown. The event came off remarkably well, considering.

Finding your event has an Octoberfest for post race refreshments sounds like it could have been attractive to some competitors. The closest I came to that was arriving at the planned assembly area on the morning of the event to find an out of town outlaw bikie gang setting up a stage for a party that night. After the event those so inclined could have stayed for the wet T-shirt competition and lots of beer. Strangely, no one did... ;-}

I remember a West Tyson meet in St. Louis that my Dad organized in 1995 or 1996. We went out in the morning to vet the controls near the river. One control was under water, but I think we failed to notice that the entire Missouri river was flowing backwards. We clipped it off the course and the race went on, sort of. We retrieved the 5 lost controls months later when the water finally went back down. They were a bit faded.

I was involved in organizing one canoe-O meet (national champs, actually) where some controls went missing overnight (some gone, others moved), and we strongly suspected that it was the work of an official in the national canoe organization who felt that the orienteering event didn't belong as part of the champs week and sabotaged us. We also suspect that he influenced the people operating the dam upstream to shut off the water, with the result that the river dropped dramatically that night and some of the previously navigable watercourses were high and dry. I also organized another canoe-O meet where dam manipulations meant that the lake turned into mudflats for the event, but was back to being a lake by the end of the afternoon when the controls were being picked up. And there was a ski-O that had to be cancelled due to lack of snow, but we moved the event to a regular map and quickly set courses -- but then it snowed several inches overnight so the meet was held on foot in the snow...

At the Sierra 2000, the US Champs were going to be on our new Burton Creek map. There were several landowners involved, including the state park and the Tahoe school district. We were using a dirt road that ran behind some houses to set controls and one of the homeowners was upset about that. He informed someone, I don't remember whom, that a small strip of land where we were setting up the finish belonged to the water district, who hadn't been contacted. Evan Custer was the meet director. Friday afternoon, he got permission from the water district, contacted the USOF Insurance Coordinator, and got a certificate for the water district in time for the meet on Saturday. We had to forego using the PA system for the finish, but were able to leave everything else the same.

Another part of the same map is now out-of-bounds because of a nest of Northern Goshawks. Besides being protected, they are highly territorial. The first we heard of them was a few years ago when a course-setter was attacked on the head. The longer courses had to be rerouted at the last minute.

So, JJ, are you saying that an official in the skiing organisation, who feels that navigation is sullying the purity of snowsports, has got a direct line to the big guy up there...

All the above "misery poker" should be studied by meet organizers/directors so as to foresee the previously unforeseeable questions - or avoid potential bad situations or dilemmas. Everything that could go wrong probably is covered or alluded to.

In the late 1980s, BOK had everything set for the US Long-O Champs, and then a couple of weeks before the event a tornado blasted right through the center of the map. The corridor of destruction was impassable in many places, but there were spots where you could get through. They quickly mapped out the affected area, and had the offset printed maps overprinted with a different color green (in three levels) showing the tornado damage. The meet went on as planned. Likewise, the Canadian Champs in Saskatchewan a few years ago had some kind of severe weather event (downburst?) shortly before the meet that flattened all of the trees in a substantial portion of the map and knocked down quite a few in the rest of it. Some hasty course rerouting was required in order to keep people out of the worst parts.

One problem that almost happened but didn't - this weekend's Australian National League sprint in Canberra is being held with an assembly area immediately adjacent to the AIS Arena, which is Canberra's main indoor sports stadium. Saturday is also the day of the final in the Women's National Basketball League. Had Canberra won their game two weeks ago these would have been happening simultaneously in the same place and we would have been having to run in between several thousand basketball fans, but Canberra lost by four points so the basketball's in Melbourne.

Now that we're talking weather how about that which befell this year's Georgia Navigator's Cup in the United States - record snowfall in an area that often goes snowless from one year to the next caused the cancellation of the January meet.
Come to think of it last July I missed out on a meet at Whistler that was cancelled due to snow and now this month I'll be able to participate in the snow-cancelled Georgia meet due to its re-scheduling.
What goes around comes around!
(I'm always impressed with the Aussie devotion to their sports teams. Several thousand would turn out to watch basketball?)

devotion to their sports teams

I suppose that exists even in Canada (or isn´t ice hockey a sport?)

Canadian spectator sports don't really go beyond (ice) hockey at the top professional and Junior A level, (Canadian) football and some soccer. The rest of our sports rarely draw more spectators than friends and family. The thought of thousands turning out to watch a women's basketball game would be a dream for the promoters.
I attribute the problem to a sports media culture with blinders that fail to see that covering a wider range of sports would benefit them by bringing in a wider range or readers/viewers. In return their coverage would encourage more fans to get out to support their local team and encourage more players to 'take their game to the next level'. But I digress. . .

Weather - I organised a metro race back in the 90's on a day that was a record temp. for Perth at the time. Something like 46 degrees C. Not a big turnout...

Last year at one of local events, several control flags went missing in the short time between the course setter putting them out and me (the vetter) checking their location.
The day of the event, the park ranger came by with our missing controls saying "are these yours?". Turned out it had been an over zealous park litter patrol who had considered our control flags as litter despite the "Do not remove" notices on them.

Like John, we had a similar situation a few years ago where 3 on-trail controls disappeared in a very short time frame, including several gallon (4 litre) jugs of water, cups, and trash bag (bin liner for you Brits) that were at one of them.

Then there was the control that went missing in the half hour between last competitor and control pickup, that was missing for six months before a park ranger found it (with SI unit still working) stuffed in a trash bin. Where it was in between, who knows?

This past weekend, heavy rain in the 24 hours before (and during) our school league event filled many small depressions and ponds in the park, with the one above providing entertainment to the -14 juniors, one of whom was seen with his SI card tied to the end of a 3-meter long stick, trying to dib the control from a distance!

How about the coming up Barebones - three events, three venues, three problems...

Venue 1: We can run on their campus, but only if we book rooms in their conference center. They are full up that night, no rooms available, so not possible to hold event on their map.

Venue 2: Initial positive reaction to proposed date/location, so I book group camp site (not so much for accommodation, more for the parking we'll need) and pay $300 non-refundable deposit. Then hear back that permission is withheld due to elk calf issues at that time of year.

Venue 3: After holding many events here over the years, now they are asking $40 for us to run there. No problem said I. Per person said they.

I'm feeling struck out.

AZ! That is so unfortunate. I was looking forward to a sprint at the Banff Centre since I'm there for a conference starting on the 15th. Was going to have my entire lab group do the race along with some other groups that will be in town.

So the Venue 3 overlords end up with zero dollars.

Geniuses.

(unless, of course, no event was the idea in the first place)

We had a 'prescribed burn' in a rogaine area the day before an event, after the controls had already been put out. Not so bad because the setters just had to lop three controls from the map on the 'map corrections' sheet. What is stupid though is that we were given permission to use the area by the local rangers (government department) but nobody had bothered to tell the people doing the burning - another government department. Idiots.

I was wondering was the Banff Centre mapped.

AZ - perhaps you could find some conference organisers who would be happy to sponsor the orienteering?

There was a prescribed burn at Hawn the day before our A-meet and Grunt last spring. We arrived early Saturday morning to an inversion layer trapping the smoke in the valley. Until we tracked down the ranger, we didn't know whether our courses and SI equipment were all toast. Fortunately the burn did not affect the courses and the wind picked up and cleared things out.

Interesting how something "prescribed" can be such a surprise to so many people.

Just because one person prescribed it doesn't mean they told anyone else. :)

and it's largely dictated by the weather. if they get the right conditions (humidity, temp, wind) they go for it.

As demonstrated at today's event at Creswick - a fire truck with 'burning off' signs in the back drove up to the start of the car park, spotted all of us and beat a hasty retreat.