Discussion: USARA Nationals

The USARA Adventure Race National Championships were held this past weekend near Santa Barbara, CA. Of the 44 teams in the co-ed division, at least two of the top 10 teams were captained by orienteers:

1st place: Eastern Mountain Sports, Jennifer Shultis
8th place: MerGeo.com, Eric Bone

It sounds like this was a very tough race that included paddling through breakers in the Pacific Ocean and lots of elevation gain on the orienteering, trekking and mountain biking sections.

Another orienteer whose team did well is Scott Pleban, 22nd place: Checkpoint Zero/ATP

Congrats to these three teams and to all who finished.

See http://www.usaranationals.com/results.aspx for finish results. The organizers are expecting to post the SI splits on Tuesday.

Hats off to the two WEDALI teams (19/20th place) as well. Justin Bakken is a top adventure racer and active O club member in MN.

I would encourage all orienteering clubs to work with adventure racing clubs, meets, etc... and I know many of them already do. It is beneficial to all.

As mentioned, many of the navigators are orienteers, or at the least club members that use local meets to train. I will say that being a team "captain" is often just a phrase for whomever had room on their credit card when registering for the race. But, the team navigator often takes on this roll not just due to the map/compass work but the other important items such as race strategy, pace management, sleep management, amount of food/water to take based on time for leg, etc...etc...

But kudos to those that can excell in both worlds as a good adventure race navigator does not necessarily make a good orienteer and a good orienteer does not necessarily make a good team navigator.

Congrats to your sister!

Yes, congrats to Jen. It's remarkable that, for the second year in a row, two teams from the same squad crossed the line together in first place.

Other orienteers:
Melissa Coombes and Tim Derrick were on the two Revo teams (6th and 7th place), and David Frei was on ThoghtProcess.net/Alpine Shop, which didn't finish.

There is some blurring of the line between orienteers and adventure racers, since many of the adventure racers at USARA Nationals (besides those already named here) show up at local orienteering events around the country, including at least a couple guys I know who were there as a volunteer race staff person and a photographer, respectively.

By the way, Tim Derrick saved me from losing a bunch of time on the misplaced checkpoint 6 (creek junction). CPs 4, 5 and 6 could be visited in any order, and many of the top teams opted to go to 6 first, including Tim's Revo team, which he reports lost about an hour looking for it to no avail. He told me this when our teams passed each other going opposite directions on a trail, so we decided to cut in early from the trail and follow the main creek down, hoping to find the checkpoint on a different creek (or creek/reentrant) junction. This is exactly what happened, with my team just happening to walk right into the checkpoint, which was about 400m too far up the creek valley. This must have been the biggest advantage I've ever gained through a misplaced control!

So there is a misplaced control at National Championships and no one protests?

It adds to the "adventure".

You can add another pair of orienteers to that list. Both Lisa Randall and I are active Georgia Orienteer members.

CP6 was a bummer for certain and our orienteering skills worked against us... we burned 2hrs hunting before bailing on it. Nobody bothered telling us it was misplaced, despite crossing paths. Not that I blame them... part of the game I guess.

There were several protests filed about it from other teams, but there were a few pre-published rules that somewhat dealt with the situation... but even still, the race was essentially hosed at that point. Lots of griping can be found all over the web. Still, it was a beautiful, fun course.

Bryan
Team Enduraventure

Carol's Team, which is comprised of local St. Louis O' folks and myself qualified, but we didn't make the trip.

Oh, and Boris, there's no such thing as a protest against the race organization in Adventure Racing. You can only protest other teams. As much as that sounds silly, there really is no remedy. What would you do, throw the race out? That doesn't really solve the problem. It sucks, but you just have to be able roll with that sort of thing if you're going to enjoy AR.

Misplaced controls have been discussed at some length throughout our sport, with no solution other than don't put them in the wrong place to begin with. Lead teams will often be skilled enough to realize they're in the right place, but the control isn't. They may make an effort to find it, but if it is unmanned, you weigh this and likely move on. Balancing all this with the fear that you will be DQ'd iff the CP is properly located. Latter teams may not have the confidence and may search for some time for the control (wasting time and energy).

I consider it ethical to communicate as soon as possible to racers and race staff the fact of the misplaced control. Revo seem to be good sports as well. Ideally race management notifies remaining racers through CP staff and dispatching folk about the situation, in attempt to make amends. But, due to times and distances involved it never works out evenly.

On a side note, that is why I believe in fewer controls and am not a big fan of unmanned controls. I will accept them, in their capacity to make teams remain on certain routes and minimizing manpower, but it is much better to see a smiling volunteers face after the hours you've spent getting there vs. a small orange flag sitting in a swamp...

"Enjoy" AR? Is that what one does? I would say I "endured" it, but I didn't enjoy much of it. To be fair, this was largely because I prefer races under 10 hours. However, the course had about 18,000 feet of climb (according to my watch), much less than the 31,000 feet advertised but still the most I've ever seen in a 24 hour race. It was also monotonous: lots of big climbs and drops on dirt roads and trails with little novel route choice or navigation challenge. The route choices were more or less bingo (a luck element), unless you had local knowledge. The 5-mile beach run and the very short orienteering course (mostly flat, navigation by trails and vegetation features) were nice, but overall, I would give the course a C, not nearly as good as last year in Tampa. It was very much what I expected (except there was very little trekking and over 90 miles of biking), but it would be nice to see better course design at the USARA National Champs. But it's not all a course design issue; Santa Barbara simply has poor terrain--steep hills and vast expanses of nasty chaparral. There were some areas in the higher elevations that were grassland with scattered trees, and it would have been nice to have had some trekking there. Perhaps there were land use issues that prevented more off-trail travel and navigation challenge.

On the positive side, the abundant climb came with some breathtaking vistas, and the nearly full moon enhanced both the near and far visibility. Also, the weather and the logistics were both nearly ideal and helped enhance my enjoyment of the event.

Regarding the misplaced checkpoint 6, someone (I don't remember his name) apparently vetted the course, by neither he nor Dan Barger caught the error. This is remarkable to me, because there was a clear view from the checkpoint to some distinct surrouding contour features, from which a back bearing would reveal that the location was hundreds of meters off. At the pre-race meeting, Barger assured the racers that all the checkpoints were in the right place, so if we didn't see a checkpoint, we should assume we had made a mistake. When my team arrived at CP 6, the checkpoint staff agreed that it was in the wrong place. At the post-race banquet and awards ceremony, Barger said that the CP had been determined to be 200 meters off. This was still incorrect, but maybe it's too embarassing to say 400 meters. The rules state that a team must visit each checkpoint to be ranked as finishing the full course, unless a checkpoint is misplaced by more than 100 meters, so the remedy for a grossly misplaced checkpoint is simply to let the results stand. I suppose the only alternatives would be to void the results (have no National Champion for 2006) or remove the trekking time using the SI splits, which of course presents its own fairness issues.

AR is still in an embryonic state with respect to rules of fairness and event quality. From what I've read, it's very much like orienteering was in the first half of the 20th century, except with the addition of other modes of travel besides on foot. History is repeating itself, yet there exists in adventure racing a frontier mentallity, as if it were something completely new. I guess there are novel aspects about the AR scene that have to do not only with the multi-sport aspect but with its current setting in history (technological, social, economic factors). It remains to be seen whether rules and standards will be developed to safeguard competitive fairness and the character of the sport, as happened with orienteering.

On a side note, [the risk of misplacing a control] is why I believe in fewer controls and am not a big fan of unmanned controls.

I am somewhat sympathetic to this thinking, but I mainly think it's more important to design an interesting course, and if that dictates an extra control or an unstaffed control, then so be it. To mitigate the risks of a control going missing, put additional streamers and/or confetti in the area, so that competitors will have another way of seeing that they are in the right place, in case of a blown down, eaten, or stollen checkpoint marker. The way to get controls in the right place to begin with is to allow enough time to do the work carefully, have a competent vetter, and not use a location if it's ill-defined and thereby not possible to verify its correctness. But as urthbuoy said, having fewer controls certainly helps lessen these burdens.

From what I've seen over the years, less controls can cause just as much controversy as too many.

Perfect example at nationals- The first team to cross the finish line, Team Ultimate Direction, ended up being penalized 4hrs for taking a forbidden route between CP 7 and 8. It was pretty clear in the rules of travel that came along with our UTMs that it was forbidden, but it sounds like they didn't glean that information as they plotted their points. Unfortunately for those guys, their error may have cost them a win.

Regardless, the whole situation would have been avoided had the course included one extra CP along the intended route. Yes, that might detract from the route choice aspect of things, but in this case, there really was no other route worth considering, so an extra CP along the way wouldn't have given anything away.

In our region, we've seen so many controversies because of teams loosely interpreting mandatory/forbidden routes. CP's can often solve that problem.

There have been plenty of current and past discussion on CP placements, redundant marking techniques, and audits on the TrailBlazer message board. Lots of lively discussion:
www.TrailBlazerar.com