Badger Orienteering Club Homepage(BGR)Badger Orienteering Club Homepage(BGR)
Results...UPDATED 7/1/10
Page...UPDATED 8/30/10
We've been busy this past year making a new map at High Cliff State Park. High Cliff is near Appleton, WI on the northeast corner of Lake Winnebago. The area mapped is above the cliff. Hopefully, we'll make it easier for people in the area to go orienteering!
The area is not very technical, so the courses will be relatively easy.
There is wild parsnip in the park, so you should wear clothes that covers your legs and then wash up after running. Wild parsnip has a chemical on all parts of the plant that gets on your skin and reacts with sunlight. The reaction causes burning and you get a rash, sort of like poison ivy, that lasts for a week or 2. You can have worse reactions if you get more on and have more sunlight. I think the courses I've designed avoid it for the most part. I don't think there will be any big problems with it. But I did want to remind people it's out there in many of our parks.
Also, at this event we will probably be using electronic punching on the long course.
8/30/10
The national organization has increased our taxes 400% in the past 4 years. Some of the state parks are charging us to use the parks. Our costs have gone up while our fees have stayed low. The time has come to raise event fees. I'll say more about this prior to next season.
8/30/10
I've fieldchecked another 4.5 sq. K in the Black River SF. We now have almost 9 sq. K there. This is some really nice and interesting terrain. There is pine plantation that is constantly changing alongside oak forest in the hilly areas. Next spring I am planning on holding a 50/50 event there. That event will be a 4 hour score event with roughly 2 hours for regular orienteering and 2 hours of rogaining(using a USGS topo). We will also offer the regular long and short courses for those who prefer to spend less time in the woods.
8/30/10
On July 1st we held our first event using our new emit electronic timing system. Emit is the most used system in Norway and Finland. You carry with you an Ecard which electronically records your time when you visit each control and punch in. At the end of the course you download your Ecard and get splits for all your legs and your finishing time.
While most clubs in this country use the SportIdent brand of electronic punching, I decided to try Emit because of it's ease in use for the event organiser. It is really easy to use and get results from. I was able to figure it out on my own in just an hour or two. It's as easy as turn it on and you can immediately download your splits. Plug in the USB port and you can get html files without any trouble. I like what I've seen so far. Can it really be this easy to use?! I think so.
It may be that we just held the first orienteering event ever to use Emit in the USA.
7/1/10
I just got back from 2 weeks in Finland where I went to participate in the world famous Jukola relay. The Jukola is the world's largest relay event. This year over 15,000 people participated. Following is a summary of my trip.
I arrived 2 weeks before Jukola in order to get some practice in finnish forest. Any time you go to a new area it takes some time to adjust to the forest and the way things are mapped. It makes things a lot easier when you know what to expect. For example, marshes in the states are things you generally run around. However, in Finland, you usually use marshes like trails. They tend to be spongey and not so wet. So, you can run right on top of them.
My first event was a national event. The woods were quite nice and I found the orienteering to be pretty easy. I squeaked into the top half in my age group. I was nervous before the event, since it had been a long time since I had run in Finland. It was a nice way to break the ice.
In the next couple of days I went to a couple of training events in the Helsinki area. These training events are like our club events. They offer a variety of course lengths and you just run any one you want. I ran the 5K option and finished 7th out of about 200. The big boys usually run the 7K course or longer. But still, I was surprised at finishing so high.
I took a few days off before going to Tampere for another national event in challenging terrain. The Finnish championships had been held there a few years earlier and I could tell why. I started out with a 12 minute mistake on the first control. It was just a silly thing, but sure didn't make me feel good. The rest of the race I struggled to go 12min/K. I did the same pace on day 2 without the large mistake, just a bunch of smaller ones. This weekend was great preparation for the Jukola which the word on the street had as being in a very technical area. In the end, I found these two events to be in similar terrain, and it was very tough in a good way.
The week before Jukola I did another training event in Helsinki that was mostly trail running with a few interesting controls. I also went to a World Cup event where lots of the big boys and girls showed up(for example Daniel Hubbman, Minna Kauppa and Simone Luder-Niggli). This terrain was really just lots of trails. I made a 4 minute mistake on an early control and still finished up running around 8.5min/K on this 4.6K middle distance course. That left me near the bottom of the standings. Just to make matters worse, my Emit electronic punching unit got wet and stopped working properly.
Next up was the big event, the Jukola Relay. I had contacted a friend who got me on one of the Tampere Pyrinto teams. They had 10 teams and put me on the last one. I was running the 6th leg which was 9.3K. It meant I needed good runs from the first 5 people to avoid a mass start at the end of the race for slow teams.
Well, this Jukola had lots of slow teams. Only 300 or so teams completed leg 6 by the mass start cutoff time. My team barely got leg 5 going before the cutoff and we were ahead of about 400 teams. There were lots of teams that didn't get to leg 5 even. The winning time was about 1 hour slower that anticipated. Oops!
The first leg has started in rain and that continued until about 3am. It was still cloudy and overcast when I started at 9:15am. The sun barely managed to peek out a couple of times during my run.
At 9am there was a mass start for leg 7, the longest leg. Then came the second mass start. Both of these had over 1000 people in them. The run to the start triangle was down a 6-8 inch deep muddy path about the width of a 2 lane road. It was about .5K through this before the mass of people split up. There were people everywhere and going in every direction. They formed lines and your best strategy was to get in one that was going your way. The woods were too thick to run in easily.
I got in line with everyone else and adjusted when they went somewhere other than where I needed to go. The whole race was like that. A couple times I took slower routes just to get away, so I could do some navigating on my own. My biggest mistakes on the course were route choice. Only once did I get confused around the control where I wasted a few minutes before following another stream of people to the next control. It was a lot less fun than actually being in the relay and running more on my own.
In the end I finished up 413th out of about 1263 on leg 6. I passed over 100 people on my leg. My team passed over 250 people on the last two legs to finish in 756th place out of over 1,500 teams that started the race. That's not bad for the 10th club team.
6/23/10
We have decided to hold a 4 week summer orienteering series. These events will be at parks in Madison. They will be held on Thursdays from 4-6pm. The courses will be 1.5-2K long and the cost will be $5/person with kids under 8 free. The courses will be similar to our usual short courses and suitable for beginners. If you are interested in assisting at these events, please let me know. It would be nice to get a helping hand!
The schedule is:
June 17th at Elver Park(parking lot near ball diamonds)
June 24th at Garner Park
July 1st at Olin Park(parking lot off Olin Avenue/John Nolan intersection)
July 8th at Elver Park
Please help us get the word out! If this series is successful, we'll do it again next year.
5/26/10
As has been talked about before on this website, the Jukola is a famous orienteering relay event. It may be the largest relay event of any type in the world. There are over 15,000 participants registered for the event this year which includes 1500 men's teams and 1100 women's teams. The race will start on June 19th at 4pm Wisconsin time(which is 11pm Finnish time). The race officially ends at 7am Wisconsin time(2pm Finnish time). I will be participating in this year's Jukola!
There are 2 ways to follow the action. They will do a live blog on worldofO.com until the winners finish. You can also go to the www.jukola.com website where splits are posted shortly after competitors punch at radio controls. That way you can follow any individuals you may be interested in.
I will be running for Tampereen Pyrinto. They have 10 teams entered and they haven't yet assigned people to teams. To see how I'm doing you can follow the link below to the team list and check out the TP teams. Trust me I won't be on the top few teams. I'll probably be on one of the bottom teams. You can follow individuals during the race by clicking on their name.
5/22/10
We just wrapped up our spring season and that usually means a long break in the orienteering action. However, we are working on plans for some events this summer, so keep checking in on the website for an update regarding summer events.
In particular, we are looking at a Devil's Lake weekend event for late July/early August. We are also considering a family oriented series of events in the Madison area on weeknights(ie like Wednesdays from 4-6). These events would be held on maps in or near Madison.
I have made two new maps just for this series. Garner and Olin will be used for the first time this summer.
If you're interested in helping make these events possible, please contact me at kevin@chorus.net. We need a few more people to keep the workload light for everyone!
Have a great summer!
5/8/10
Please note that the December 5th event has been changed to December 4th.
5/1/10
What do orienteers do in the winter when the woods are snowcovered? How about travelling to a warmer climate? That's just what I did a couple weeks ago. The San Diego club was putting on an event one weekend and the Tucson club organized an event the following weekend with a training camp during the week. It was a rare chance to get in 9 consecutive days of orienteering. That made it an opportunity I couldn't pass up!
The first weekend was at Anza Borrego State Park, a famous orienteering area that I had never been to. Badger club member Rich J. had told me it was interesting terrain and this was my chance to experience it for myself. They had a 2 day local event with a longer goat event on the following Monday. A goat is a long distance event with a mass start and allows skipping a few controls usually.
On Saturday, I found out what Anza was all about, desert, cacti and interesting terrain. I had trouble adjusting to the map and terrain which led to many mistakes. I had a poor run, but wasn't unhappy. Often it takes a few runs to adjust to new areas. This was no different. I went slow and still couldn't stay in contact with the map. I just couldn't match up the map with the terrain even when I just stood there for a few minutes looking out over it. I fought it the whole course.
The scenery was awesome, desert canyons and wide open areas with dry gullies everywhere. The cacti were painful and plentiful. If you stopped paying attention you'd end up with needles in your leg. And when you tried to pull them out you would have needles in your hand. It took some technique to remove them. I still have pleny of slivers in my legs and hand. (Really, it wasn't that bad).
Sunday I hit my groove. Even after a slow start when I stopped to ask where the start was(the start triangle wasn't on the right place on the map), I hammered out a fast run and was able to read the map, unlike the previous day. I had the fastest time on Green by about 7 minutes.
Monday was more of the same. I did the 7K lamb goat style event. I blasted into the lead before making a big mistake on the 5th control. A few guys caught up to me at 7, but 2 markers later on a long flat leg I simply outran them to take the lead for good. I only skipped 1 control instead of the 2 allowed and still came out on top.
The event was marred by poor organization. There were misplaced and missing controls on numerous courses. Fortunately for me, I ran late both days and never encountered any of those problems. The problems were fixed before I started, so I had a great 3 days of orienteering. There were other organizational issues that I won't discuss now. It was just a reminder of how a great weekend of orienteering can be ruined before it starts if things aren't done right.
Another bonus was that the world's #1 orienteer, Daniel Hubmann of Switzerland, participated.
Next, it was time for a trip to Tucson. I stopped by an hot spring along the way for a soak, before finishing up the 6 hour drive.
The next 4 days were training camp days. Each day we got to run on 2 maps, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. It was a lot of time on maps and the terrain was widely varied. The exercises were also different each day. Some of the terrain was flat as a pancake with scrubby cacti everywhere. Other terrain was at elevation above where cacti grow. One day we needed a 4 wheel drive shuttle to get to the start. There we saw some beautiful rock formations. Footing in the hilly areas was rocky and you had to be careful not to twist your ankle or fall into cacti. While each day was great fun, by the end of the week I was getting tired of collecting cacti needles in my body. I was all scratched up and reinjured my ankle.
Nevertheless, I was having a blast. I loved the natural beauty and the daily dose of orienteering. I found it to be at the level I wanted to train at. I enjoyed the company of the small group of people who were also there day after day. On a few occasions I left my compass in my pocket to force myself to read the map more precisely. On other days I went all out or went very slowly and carefully. Training allows you to try out new things or work on stuff you're having trouble with. It's a good time to experiment.
The Tucson club even provided housing. A couple members opened their houses which was really nice. We had a potluck on the final night with about 20 people showing up.
The final weekend was a 2 day event on a map called Ironwood. Except for a small section of rocky hills, it was a map of dryditches in a flat desert. At first this looked to be a very difficult place to orienteer. But once I was used to the map, I found it to be quite easy and fast. After making a big silly mistake on Saturday, I was determined to bang out an impressive run on Sunday. I went out almost full speed and kept pushing the whole way. I made one mistake of about 1.5 minutes and still ran under 7 min/K for the 5K course. That was the final day and a good way to leave Tucson.
I orienteered 12 times in 9 days. I was able to shake a little of the rust off from a winter of not orienteering. And I got to enjoy some warm weather in the middle of January. You might want to consider this trip if they do it again in the future. It's a very different orienteering experience from what we have in Wisconsin and a very beautiful one. I give it 2 thumbs up!
1/31/10
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send comments or suggestions to kevin at: kevin@chorus.net
