Badger Orienteering Club Homepage(BGR)Badger Orienteering Club Homepage(BGR)Phone: 608-294-1958, email kevin@chorus.net
Results...UPDATED 11/7/9
UPDATED 2/21/10
The Badger Orienteering Club will be hosting our annual scout event the last Saturday in March. All scouts are welcome, as well as anyone else who would like to attend. The scout event starts at 10am with a brief review of orienteering at 9:30am. The regular club event starts around noon after the scouts are done.
For registration and waiver forms please go to the following link and print. http://userpages.chorus.net/kevin/scout.html
Lake Kegonsa State Park is a good area for beginners to learn orienteering. The orienteering is easy and there are lots of features to keep you on track. If you're interested in orienteering but haven't tried it before, this would be a great place to start. For advanced orienteers it will be like a sprint event, very fast and relatively short.
I hope to see a lot of you out there!!
2/21/10
This April one of our events will be a rogaine. A rogaine is a long navigation event usually using a USGS topo, instead of an orienteering map. The traditional rogaine is 24 hours long. Ours will be 6 hours. We will use a map made from USGS topos, not an orienteering map. Find as many markers as you can within the time limit and in any order you choose, like a score-O. It will be a mass start(ie everyone at the same time). Most teams will not be able to get to all the markers in 6 hours. I think it will be possible for a few teams to do so. The length will be roughly 30K.
It is a 2-person team event and the cost is $20 per person.
The start will be from the parking lot on Settlement Rd. Take I-94 to Millston. Exit on hwy O going north of the interstate. After about a 1/2 mile or less turn left on Settlement Rd. Follow it for a few miles and watch for the parking lot on the left after you go over a hill. Please look at a map before heading out to get an idea of where you are going.
2/21/10
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
