April 22 at South Umstead

Yes, we'll be orienteering in Umstead this year as well!!! Hard to believe it, I know. I am really looking forward to it though.

Got the courses designed and approved by the park already. Just to give you a heads up, I decided to try something different from I've been doing before. The advanced courses will have lesser number of controls, but several really long legs with lots of route choices. For example,

• Red will have 12 controls and three (!!!) 1KM legs, 6.8KM
  
• Green - 10 controls, one 1KM leg, 5.1KM
  
• Brown - 9 controls, three 0.6KM legs, 4.1KM
  

If you can, try Red, it should be very interesting.

Another thing is that there will be a remote start for advanced courses, so people would be able to spend more time behind the river in the "juicy" part of the park.

Birkhead Map. Aftermath

And the meet is over. Feels weird. Empty. So much time and effort was put into it over the past 3 months, it's hard to accept that it's all over. Yes, we should meet and do some "lessons learned" thing. Even if just for the sake of a closure.

Meanwhile I did some reading on attackpoint.org. I almost wish I didn't - people tend to emphasize negative experiences, it was at times hard to bear. I know, most of the runners were quite happy about the event, but still...

Anyway, I was mostly interested in their comments about the map. After all, I did spent something around 50 hours refreshing various portions of the map - I guess it was my "highest profile" mapping job so far. Here is what I found (combined with what people said during the meet):

• In general the map was adequate, but not great
• Contours were fine and usable with one exception (group of re-entrants on a side of a huge hill on Blue was down about 2 contours on the map - the re-entrants should have been drawn higher up. Apparently wasn't such a big deal - no one lost significant time because of it)
• Our choice of representing rocks and rock formations was unusual. However, after people got accustomed to this style, they were able to take advantage of extra information conveyed by it. At least some people. There were two cases where we supposedly went against ISOM standard:
  • when using 202.0 Rock pillar/cliff symbol for medium size prolongated rocks - attempt to show an unusual shape of these rocks...
  • when mapping some of rocks under 1m as small boulders - it was indeed the case but only in the areas where no big boulders were around.
• Green was mostly OK, but not consistent in some areas. Especially in SW corner where we updated green on some areas and didn't have time to do it on adjacent areas.
• Amount and accuracy of various features on the map was OK.

How to take it? I don't know. From one side, it's hard to accept "not great" consensus after putting so much effort into it - feels like I didn't do a very good job out there. But at the same time I know that if I wouldn't done what I did, we'd have many more complaints and possibly courses thrown away. So it wasn't a waste. Plus we have a reasonably good map for our local meets now, where we could run without getting confused anymore.

I guess, positives should overweight and eventually they will,.. but not yet, not today.