From: Bond 007 <bond007@infinet.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 08:59:49 -0400
Subject: Pumpkin Hunt A-Meet - Late Fees after Oct. 2
Message-Id: <37F20D45.1AF4AF38@infinet.com>
October 2, 1999, is the last day to postmark your Pumpkin Hunt A-Meet
entry and avoid a late fee.
The Pumpkin Hunt A-Meet is October 23 & 24, near Dayton, Ohio, USA. For
more info visit: http://members.aol.com/pumpknhunt/index.htm
In conjunction with the A-Meet, OCIN is hosting a Vampire-O on Friday
evening, October 22. For more info on the Vampire-O visit:
http://members.aol.com/pumpknhunt/vampire.htm
FYI, the woods will be relatively open. For August we had only 1.8
inches of rain. This is 1.4 inches less than normal. Now in September
to date we have had only 0.16 inch (2.22 less than normal). So here it
is the end of September and the forest looks like it does in the middle
of October.
Matt Bond
Meet Director
From: "Brendan O'Brien" <brendan.obrien@astutec.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 15:48:34 +0100
Subject: RE: Events in California Oct 23 - 31 '99..?
Message-ID: <01BF0A92.18BCE9C0.brendan.obrien@astutec.com>
Are there any orienteering events in the California area between 23 and 31 October 1999.
I will be there for a short holiday, arriving in Sna Francisco and departing from LA.
Thanks.
Brendan
_______________
Brendan O'Brien
Astutec
Ph. +353 1 66 76 760
Fax.+353 1 66 76 761
From: Mikell Platt <mikell@sprynet.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 00:51:55 -0600
Subject: A Trip Recently Concluded
Message-ID: <39D43C0A.817D0DEB@sprynet.com>
Hi All,
What follows is my version of a trip to the US Champs and back. Given
that this is the age of the Clinton, be aware that some of the details
may have been altered in the recounting.
I packed up my mobile headquarters on a sunny morning nearly 2 weeks
ago, and plunged northward deep into Wyoming, first severing the Red
Desert neatly in two and then heading for Montana via Riverton.
Unfortunately, my trip got off to a doubly inauspicious start as I first
missed a small highway which would have eliminated the need to dogleg to
Lander. How did I miss that road, anyhow? But the real problem was
that when I went through the village of Hudson, the Sheriff got me for
the heinous crime of doing 29 through the center of town. Really, the
place was so tiny you would never have guessed they could have afforded
police, but I guess if you write enough tickets, you can send a man to
the moon.
The fine system is interesting in Hudson. If you're from most counties
in Wyoming (you can tell by the license plate number which county one is
from), you pay 1/4 of the base fine. If you're from the liberal (all
things are relative) SE corner of the state, you pay 1/2 the base rate.
If you're from the Hollywood section of the state (Jackson), you pay
3/4. If you're from out of state, you get to pony up the whole thing.
Tourism is a wonderful industry!
Anyhow, my fine was $45, which the friendly sheriff generously reduced
by $5 since I was wearing my seatbelt. And always glad to do my part to
help local struggling economies around the state, I left Hudson with a
smile...well, ok, at least I left without grimacing too badly.
I crossed into Montana at about nightfall with brief stops in
Thermopolis to admire the world's largest hotspring (talk about
babes!!!) and at Greybull, which has the largest collection of big
planes in the Mountain West outside of DIA. Really! And even if it's
not the second largest plane fleet, it's quite an impressive air fleet
of planes nonetheless. They're for fighting fires, if you couldn't
guess, and the odd thing about that was that way up in the Bighorn
Mountains right behind the airport there was an obvious forest fire
which seemingly was being totally ignored.
I stopped at the Wal-Mart in Bozeman and crashed for the night. You may
not know it, but in a very low key way Wal-Mart is quietly encouraging
RVs and such to overnight in their parking lots. It's good for
business, apparently. They're not quite to the point of putting in
restrooms with showers, and picnic tables and such, but perhaps that
will come in time.
From there I practically re-traced the route me and my good friends
Goran and Ingrid Ohlund had taken the previous summer on our way out to
the US Champs in Washington. Though I did stop at the Montana-Idaho
border as I was getting hungry, and I thought maybe if I went running I
could get some bear for the stewpot. But they must have heard me coming
because I didn't even find a bear print, much less a bear itself.
Eerily, no sooner did I cross into Washington than the temperature shot
up many degrees, as if to also re-create weather conditions from the
previous year.
Why Washington? To hit the EWOC "A" meet. I had never orienteered in
eastern Washington, but some of the terrain and forest around Spokane
had looked very interesting from the interstate, and even if it would
clearly be nothing like the US Champs, it seemed like a reasonable
warm-up event anyhow. And, at the very least, it did turn out to be
warm, well up into the 80s I reckon for Day 1.
The terrain was unlike anything I've run through before. The race took
place in "scablands" terrain, which consists of basalt which had been
scoured to various degrees by a catastrophic glacial flood some tens of
thousands of years ago. There was very intricate contour detail and
some negative relief terrain, but only the larger terrain features were
shown on the map, which was based on a USGS for a base map (mapping the
contours in greater detail would have been an entirely thankless task
without a better base--trust me). There were also lots of cliffs, which
were almost uniformly about 2m high. There was a little forest in one
small section of the map, and otherwise it was just a grassland. There
were a few water features in some of the low areas, including some
marshes. Unfortunately, you couldn't guess from the map whether or not
the marshes were easily crossed, crossable with difficulty, or hopeless,
and each of the 3 times I guessed, I guessed wrong, ending up in deep
water and thick reed jungles twice, and running a fairly long way off
the beeline to avoid a marsh that turned out to be dry and which
contained only grass of a length suitable for a fairway. HA! So it can
go.
The Blue courses were long, owing to the fast and unhilly nature of the
terrain. 13+ kms both days. However, the times were not fast, owing to
the same 13+ kms each day, and assisted much by beastly sun and heat the
first day. After just a few kilometers I had to ease off my pace
considerably--it was either that or melt! And it also turned out the
running was anything but easy. Often the surface had bits of blocky
basalt rock the feet had to contend with, and where it wasn't rocky the
grass could get pretty high, and where it wasn't rocky or grassy there
were small sage bushes and other things to contend with. By the end of
the weekend, I suspect that quite a few runners had contracted
blisters.
I finished 3rd, a few minutes behind the winning Andy Dale (well done!)
and Eric Bone. Apparently this caused some people to get consternated,
because I got no end of questions from people wondering if something had
gone wrong, or if I was sick or injured, or if I had eaten of flesh, and
so on, as if it weren't possible to run and not win sometimes.
From Spokane, I headed down for the Ashland-Medford area of Oregon, and
spent the mid-week with a good friend of mine. Along the way I passed
through Richmond--one of the towns the Eberleins had formerly resided
in--which very hazy, dusty, windy, and even hotter than where we had
been running near Spokane. If you're not a wheat farmer, there is no
good reason to live there. In fact, there may be no good reason to live
there, period.
Then on for Lake Tahoe and the big event. Along the way I passed by Mt
Shasta, which would make for a nice hill climb workout except that it is
a volcano, and running on volcanic rock is hell. The Hawaiians will try
to tell touristos otherwise, but running on lava and cinders and
volcanic bombs and such is the worst.
I got to the model event site on Friday early enough to beat everyone
but the Donalds from Canada and perhaps one or two other cars of
orienteers. If a model event is being offered on relevant map and
terrain, you should make the most of it, and since the model was on
actual terrain and used a bit of the actual map, it certainly qualified
as relevant. I jogged through the model course once, and then ran it at
something approaching competition pace to get a feel for it, and then
spent some time just walking around and looking at various features and
seeing how they had been mapped. (The map, by the way, was good, and
must have been a real labor, due to the big, taxing slopes, prolific
rock detail, and a canopy which probably meant the basemap must have
been sketchy in places.) Four things were clear: some of the point
features weren't going to be useful for navigation, contouring on the
steep and surprisingly sandy slopes was going to be tough, the terrain
was going to be physically demanding--especially on the second day, and
the controls were going to be set very low, practically on the ground.
With courses that featured an awful lot of controls (29 controls for 8.6
kms on Day 2 Blue, for example--a record?), times weren't going to be
fast.
Joe Brautigam joined me at the model, and we drove over to our
accomodations at Meet HQs. Nancy Koehler had booked a suite for 6
there, which turned out to be a great arrangement. Bob McBride and JJ
were also staying there, along with Nancy, and finally Amy Fuller--a
Minnesotan just starting university at McGill in Montreal. Since Joe
and I got there first, and since we had no idea when anyone else would
arrive, we seized one room for ourselves, and were asleep before the
rest of the crowd arrived, all of whom came later than planned because
of flight delays.
If you share a room with Joe, you do need to be sure that the windows
are in good working order so that you can access the fresh, cool night
air, because from time to time Joe will get into the garlic and get into
it really good. And if you're trapped in a room of warm, stale air with
the pungent aroma of garlic becoming ever stronger, forget about
sleeping. Joe did hit the garlic big time ("the chunks of garlic were
this big," he would say, holding his hands several feet apart in a too
obvious attempt to purvey a garlic tale), but it was no problem with the
crystal Tahoe air flooding through the window.
Day 1 took place on a rolling to hilly piece of terrain across one
highway from the main part of the map. The map itself was printed to
size from an inkjet printer, with good print quality. The forest was
clean, and consisted of large, well spaced pine and evergreen trees,
with many smaller mapped clearings in the manner typical of so many of
our western forests. The middle, and largest, part of the map was rather
bland with few features of note. Blue was 8.4 kms with 20 controls, and
a fair amount of climb, and included a map exchange. The runnability
was good, with only a little bit of sidehilling across a really steep,
sandy slope.
JJ has talked before about the need for another sort of control
description: control in the forest. That is, a control more or less
just off somewhere in the forest, on no feature more distinctive than
the control itself. This could have been a useful definition on Day 1,
with half of the blue controls being on rootstocks, stumps, or clearings
which--at least to my eye, as I ran--appeared to be quite un-noteworthy
other than the fact that a control happened to be stationed there. The
first leg was scary looking, a longish (for the day) leg which ran
across a bland slope and ended at a small clearing. But after that, the
navigation was fairly straight forward, and even if sometimes when you
ran into the circle you had to wonder a bit about what it was the
control was supposed to be on, the visibility was such that if you just
let your eyes wander the landscape you could usually detect the control
straight-away, or else a likely suspect for the control feature. At any
rate, none of the controls had a bingo feel to me. I missed one control
when I ran a little too fast and rough through one control circle and
laid down a few minutes sorting that out, and was off by a little bit on
2 other controls, but otherwise felt good about things. I won the day
by about a minute. Physically, the day felt very easy. There was only
one really steep hill to climb, and it was short, and then the short
course length combined with controls every few hundred meters meant that
running just wasn't much a factor.
Day 2 was a different kind of animal altogether. It took place nearly
entirely in the steepest, hilliest terrain and while the controls
averaged less than 300m apart, there were constant climbs and much
contouring on steeply pitched slopes which were so sandy that your
footing was constantly giving out on you. Route choice was,
predictably, minimal, and the real challenge was to keep your
concentration together for so many controls and to keep pushing along
and not give up on the many climbs. Control features were different
too, and except for one, everything sat exactly as I imagined, on very
distinct features. But already early in the course I had an opportunity
to glance over the entire course, and I had seen that one control--a
pit--looked like trouble. I had tried to find several pits on the model
map, and I was never satisfied that I had actually found whatever it was
the mapper had seen. And this pit was just out on a big, bland slope
with no useful features anywhere nearby. Several times later in the
race I looked at the leg again to see if there was a way I could make
the control easy, but I kept drawing blanks. So my plan became to run
at it with crossed fingers (not much of a plan!) and hopefully bounce
off a trail behind it (and below it, of course!) if/when I missed the
control. I punched #22--the pit was next--with a completely clean run
in hand so far, and just about 15 seconds behind Andy Dale, who I had
had in sight for the past 5 controls. As it turned out, James
Scarborough had just punched as well, though I didn't see him. Andy set
off on a different line than I planned so I disregarded him and didn't
see him again. Too bad, because if I had known Andy and James were out
there together I would have at the very least tried to keep an eye on
them--surely not all three of us would miss the control! Not only did I
not see them, after the halfway point in the leg I didn't see anything
else useful either. Eventually I was at the top of a big, slope and
though I knew I was generally in about the right place, I couldn't look
down the slope and just "generally" see the control or anything else but
more forest. So I headed on down, missed the control, hit the trail,
estimated where I was, and headed back up until I could see the tops of
some water jugs. I don't know how much time that cost but I will be
able to estimate it from Andy's time once I see results; probably it was
2-3 minutes or so. When I punched I felt pretty good about things
though. The rest of the course looked pretty simple and there wasn't
much left anyway. With a clean run up until the pit, and with all those
climbs to take the sting out of the faster legs, I figured the odds were
leaning my way. How often does anyone ever get through so many controls
with no mistakes at all. Not often. Probably everyone had missed at
least something.
Too bad about the pit--it's like a batter getting lucky and dribbling
one through the infield in the 9th and ruining a no-hitter. If I had
gotten that control directly it would have been a nearly perfect
championship run, that most satisfying of things. It will be
interesting to go back out there and take a look at the area again and
see how it looks when the seconds aren't bleeding through the brain (it
seems it always looks afterwards!) For now I reckon it was too bingo,
but maybe a cooler look would determine it was fairly and well placed.
But no matter, I got into the finish with no further incident, and
feeling like I had given the course about everything I had to give
physically, and it turned out to be good enough.
Great kudos to BAOC! They put on a fantastic event, just first rate in
every way. The effort was obvious. The work and organization they put
into this produced as polished an event as one could hope for, and my
recommendation is that any time BAOC chooses to put on a major event in
the Sierras, you should try hard to get to it. Folks who didn't make it
out will be kicking themselves for the rest of the millennium and
probably the next one, too!
After so many short legs, it seemed time for a properly long leg, so on
the Monday following the Championships I made a long one of it, and just
drove east on rough compass. About 10pm my truck started shaking
violently from wind, so I suspected I was getting close to home, and
when I could look out and see snow by the side of the road, I knew it
was time to take the next exit. I didn't even bother to see what the
signs said, I knew it would be Laramie. And sure enough, by midnight I
could look out into the yard and see several inches of new snow in it.
A funny thing to leave in Summer and come back to Winter, but by now
I've got used to it--that's the way it's been for 3 of the 4 past US
Championships I've gone to!
--Mikell
From: Mikell Platt <mikell@sprynet.com>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 02:23:27 -0600
Subject: Re: A Trip Recently Concluded
Message-ID: <39D4517F.F1D7E25F@sprynet.com>
Sorry! I hadn't meant to send the message entitled "A Trip Recently
Concluded" out over the ONET. Probably little (or none) of it would be
of much interest to the ONET and certainly a great deal of it would
leave you wondering "why is this supposed to be of any interest?"
--Mikell Platt
From: "Andrew Kelly" <andrewk@dial.pipex.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 08:52:46 +0100
Subject: Re: Where did the VAT refund go?
Message-ID: <003301bf0a54$291780c0$7496bc3e@default>
I'm sure that most (all) will realise, but to be on the safe side: The
posting with the above subject, although with my name on the bottom, was
made by Simon Beck, as the 'from' indicates.
Andrew Kelly
From: "Evan Custer" <evancuster@home.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 23:12:19 -0700
Subject: Need address for Markku Hannula
Message-ID: <003301bf0a41$9630dd40$94190118@wntck1.sfba.home.com>
Markku Hannula had the fastest time on M35 at the US Championships last
weekend, but he left before he received his medal. Unfortunately, he did
not include his address on the entry form. If anybody knows how I can
contact him, please let me know. His club is EsSu.
Evan Custer
evancuster@home.com
Voice: 1-925-254-5628
Fax: 1-925-254-5961
18 Bobolink Road, Orinda, CA 94563-1706
Bay Area Orienteering Club
http://www.baoc.org
baoc@baoc.org or baoc@lists.stanford.edu
Information hot line: 408-255-8018
From: "Evan Custer" <evancuster@home.com>
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 22:40:12 -0700
Subject: US Champions
Message-ID: <003001bf0a3d$19681e80$94190118@wntck1.sfba.home.com>
The following are the US Orienteering Champions for 1999. Complete results
for the championships hopefully will be posted on the BAOC web site by
Wednesday.
M-21+ Mikell Platt RMOC
F -21+ Angelica Riley DVOA/BAOC
M-20 Boris Granovskiy CSU
M35+ Rick Oliver BAOC
M40+ Kent Ohlund BAOC
M45+ Bruce Wolfe BAOC
M Red Trevor Pering BAOC
F-20 Suzanne Armstrong SLOC
F35+ Eileen Breseman COC
F40+ Nancy Koehler UNO
F45+ Linda Kohn ROC
F50+ Gail Gagarin NEOC
F55+ Miki Snell NTOA
F Green Elizabeth Suing NEOH
M-18 Rey Solis HOC
M50+ Ron Hudson LAOC
M55+ Don Davis QOC
M60+ Joe Scarborough BAOC
M Green David Webber HVO
F-18 Sarah Minarik BAOC
F60+ Linda Moore NISQ
F65+ Ruth Johnson NEOC
F70+ Margareta Lambert RMOC
F-Brown Rosemary Johnson BAOC
M65+ Ed Gookin SDO
M70+ Knut Olson COC
M-Brown Orlyn Skrien SLOC
F-16 Anneliese Steuben BAOC
M-16 Ross Smith CNYO
F-Orange Roberta Fothergill CTOC
M-Orange Richard Jerrard LAOC
F-14 Lauren Wolfe BAOC
M-14 Eric Menendez DVOA
F-Yellow Lauren Wemmer
Grp-Yellow George & Pat Aster BAOC
F-10 Rachel Care BAOC
M-10 Ryan Breseman COC
F-12 Katie Anthony BAOC
M-12 Malcolm Wyatt-Mair BAOC
M/F White Karen Allen
GR-White Marsha Jacobs/Meg Gerstner BAOC
Evan Custer
evancuster@home.com
Voice: 1-925-254-5628
Fax: 1-925-254-5961
18 Bobolink Road, Orinda, CA 94563-1706
Bay Area Orienteering Club
http://www.baoc.org
baoc@baoc.org or baoc@lists.stanford.edu
Information hot line: 408-255-8018
From: simonbeck6219@my-deja.com
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1999 23:36:13 GMT
Subject: Where did the VAT refund go?
Message-Id: <7srjdc$65$1@nnrp1.deja.com>
Italics: Stuff written by Andrew Kelly in response to my earlier
posting...... Sorry if I already posted this, I tried and failed
several times, I'm unsure whether this ever appeared.
so that they can
>raise enough money to pay the BOF levy which, as everyone knows, has
>had to be set at record levels to make up for past expenditure on
>things like management consultants.
Complete nonsense. On the occasions when consultants have
been bought in, the money to pay for them has been made available from
the
Sports Councils.
Andrew has promised to check this, does anyone else know for sure
whether the
whitley report was paid for by BOF or the sports council? I
understand the original
plan was to split the cost equally. Our club voted thru a motion of
censure on this issue at its AGM
(No prizes for guessing the name of the proposer) , when we received
the response from BOF, it was not pointed out that the sports council
had covered ALL the cost,
possibly eventually the sports council did so, after all, it was their
idea in the
first place (assuming, of course, the info that filtered down to me is
correct).
With hindsight the Witley report was even more of a waste of money than
we thought it
would be; the only person I found who admitted to having voted in
favor of getting
the study done in the first place (one of the BOF councillors)
subsequently spent a great
deal of time and energy lobbying against the resulting reccomendation
to get rid of BOF councillors,
Then about a year later there was another study, that I understand WAS
entirely funded by
the sports council, the "needs analysis study", which covered a lot of
the same ground.
When I get round to writing the required script, I'm going to put a
report generator on my website,
similar to the complaining letter generator on the OUSCR website.
(Orienteering doesn't really
need the latter...............
BOF is regarded by Sports Council auditors as one of the most
efficiently organised national
governing bodies.
May well be true most of the time, and I can't see anything badly wrong
with what's happening
at present; I recall those people who made such a fuss at the 1999 BOF
AGM concerning the
BOF levy, where were they in 1995 when BOF was frittering away that
UKP27000 "VAT refund"? (Whatever it went on,
I could mention another wasteful expenditure about that time)
Had they used the democratic process at the time b4 it was too late, in
the way I did, it
might just have swung the issue. As it was, I think people just said
"It's just Simon going
back to his old ways", and I was considered rather irrelevant.
Part of the problem is that every BOF leadership seems to have its own
comfort level of
funds it needs to feel secure. This is why the message coming from on
high alternates between
"We can afford it - go for it" and "We're skint! We've got to trim
the flab and put up
charges". The recently departed BOF treasurer seemed to
have a comfort level of UKP250,000. My worry is that next time
there's a change of leadership,
the comfort level will be somewhat lower, say UKP150,000. Then
they'll say "Oh goody.
There's UKP250000 in the kitty, UKP150000 is ample, let's go out and
spend the surplus
UKP100000. And so off they'll go and the first thing the membership
will know is when
they find out in compasssport about 3 months after it's too late to
complain, that a whole
load of money has been spent on something that those who spent it know
damnned well wouldn't
get the approval of the AGM.
Maybe Sports council thinks spending money on mangement consultants is
efficient? How
does one compare different sports? Anyway, I blame the members mainly
for BOF's
inefficiencies. How many others, if anyone, other than myself,
actually made a fuss and wrote to at
least one BOF councillor to try to persuade them not to go ahead with
the Witley study
before it was too late?
Most people presumed BOF had its arm twisted by sports council into
going for the witley report.
But I'd still like to know what really happened, I've just been asked
to pay what I consider an
unreasonable amount of money to represent England in the Veteran Home
International, with all
respect to those who've done their best to get funding for the event,
and those I shall be asking
to help me, management counsultants (and the other things those in a
position of leadership did with
the UKP27,000 BOF got from the government in "vat refunds") seems a
rather poor use of funds
that could have been spent elsewhere.
And, on a note of pure curiosity, having not gone to the event, what
was the
difference between the Saturday national event at GBP 7.50/3.00 (a good
price for a National Event nowadays) and the Chasing Start event on
Sunday
at GBP 4.50/2.00?
A new map? Priority on the course planning? Sound reasonable ratios
to me.
Andrew Kelly
----
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Before you buy.