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OOC Shines in Buffalo Meet

What do you get when you have a Canadian long weekend and a three-event orienteering meet in New York State in ‘new’ terrain that is reputed to be open forest with interesting features?

You get 19 orienteers from the Ottawa area travelling to the Buffalo ‘O’ Fest and coming home with a total of 29 top three finishes between them.

‘Running up in class’ is the term used to describe young orienteers who run in an older age class than their natural one and an older orienteer who runs with the younger participants. At the Buffalo meet Alexander Bergstrom, 14, ran up to win three M 16 races and in the process beat all OOC competitors, including dad Stefan and Alex Teutsch on the Sprint Course 2.

Eleven year old Ian Kemp took a first, second and third place in M 14. Molly Kemp ‘ran up’ to a seventh place in F 21 Middle and first in F 20 Long. She won the F-16 sprint.

However, the queen of those moving up in class had to be 17 year old Emily Kemp. Emily not only competed with the 21 elite; she competed against the males. She placed 16th in the Middle, 10th in the Sprint and 14th in the Long event. Her sprint time tied her brother Eric to the second. Also in the Sprint had she chosen to compete in women’s elite on the same course Emily would have won by over a minute.

Other triple top-three finishers from Ottawa included Laura Teutsch, Gloria Rankin, Lorna Guttormson, Anne Teutsch and Alex Teutsch.

Richard Guttormson, Jeff Teutsch, Stefan Bergstrom and Robbie Anderson each had at least one top-three finish.

The maps and terrain? They lived up to their promised excellence with some of the cleanest, most open forest running one will find in the north-eastern corner of our continent.

The weather? Saturday it rained a bit and Sunday was cold and windy but on the bright side that kept the bugs at bay for another week.

David Cady and the Buffalo Orienteering Club were putting on their first 'sanctioned' meet in many years. They wanted to do it right and they did.

We can view the maps and courses at the following Route Gadget site: http://www.vmeyer.net/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi Meet participants can draw in their courses at the same site.

Contributed by Gord Hunter, pictures from the Buffalo O Club

Desert "O"/Sand "O"

While some of you were enjoying a snowy Ski "O", I was sweating it out at an orienteering event in the Anza - Borrego Desert a few hours east of San Diego. Susan and I had a vacation set to spend some time in Southern California and when finally got around to it I Googled orienteering and found an event at the right time and place. Clearly fate had determined that I should compete so I signed up on-line for the Red (Long Advanced), then told Susan.

It was organized by the San Diego Orienteering Club and was a 'B' Meet, but there were events on both Saturday and Sunday, including a 'Maze-O" event. There were about 75 people registered by the early cut off. The cost for 1 day was $10 US early or $13 late, so I think our fee's are pretty good value. They had assigned start times for those who registered early but did not update after the cut off so I did not know when I would be starting.

Their instructions to the start were good, but the sign on the highway was literally the size of a shoe box on the shoulder. Not a problem as there aren't too many roads in the desert. The road to the start was not much more than a track but it was a rental car so I wasn't worried, much.

Starts were listed from 9:00 on but I did not have a time so ate a huge breakfast in case I ended up with a late start. It was already hot at 8:00AM when I signed in and was told I could start anytime after 8:30. The Meet Director recommended taking an early time as "it is not going to get any colder". He said the Saturday courses had been better and it would not be too challenging today.

The terrain was sand, rocks, lots of small contours, reentrants, dry creek beds and no vegetation except cactus. The map, (see it here as a pdf file with my route in orange), had no colour except blue for dry creek beds. I warmed up, drank up, and started at a slow jog while I tried to match the small contours to the map. After that breakfast, running was not going to happen. Controls 1 and 2 were straight forward and for the long leg (1.2 km) to 3 I took a bearing and sighted to a single tree, which turned out to be a large cactus, on top of the hill across the valley. I managed to veer north and miss it, saw I was close to the trail near the top edge of the map and reorient myself to where I actually was. After a few forays into reentrants still too far north I found what should have been an easy control.

Following the dry creek bed got me to 4 quickly. Although the route to 5 was flat across the valley and easy the control at the dry creeks was not visible until you were very close. A climb up the steep reentrant on the way to 6 got me to the top of the hill and I sighted across for the knoll on my direct route. This is where I had a total brain collapse and headed to the large knoll near #10. What was I thinking? After again reorienting myself I headed back and got 6, then 7. I did manage to get fastest time of day on the 6 to 7 leg - 1:36.

The State Park guide brochures warned about the Cholla cactus. It does not look like the large flat cactus you see on TV; it has spines all around its tube-like branches. "… has the reputation of being the most formidable. Not only do its long, thin spines readily penetrate clothing, shoes and flesh, but the tip of each spine is armed with tiny curved barbs that assure it remains anchored…. Sometimes called the "jumping cholla" because the joints appear to jump off the plant even if they are barely touched... Being impaled by a cholla leaves a lasting impression".

They are right. Apparently you are supposed to carry a comb to remove them. Those who know me know that I don't carry a comb anymore. I could not find any rocks the right shape, and there were certainly no sticks but the edge of the compass worked. I would like to think that I can blame my slow times on that.

People were catching up and I played leapfrog with another fellow on 8 through 12. Both of us ended up too far west on our way to 13. I passed him again and dropped my empty water bottle and hat at the start on the way to 14. I overshot it but got back on track after not too long and the rest were easy.

At the finish I noticed a woman wearing a shirt from Golden Horseshoe club in Hamilton so talked to her. Her name is Nancy Coker and she now lives in Ocean Beach with her husband but had grown up orienteering with GHO as her father was a founder. She remembered the old timers from Ottawa like Gord Hunter (sorry Gord).

My splits and control card are on this PDF.

My time of 103.19 put me well into the bottom half of the pack, but it was very good event and good practice on very different terrain. If you are planning a trip to Southern California check sandiegoorienteering.com and try one of their events. Bring a comb.

Rorry Harding

Postscript - from Gord Hunter

I remember Nancy (Lee) Coker well. Her dad, Jack, is the oldest timer in Ontario orienteering. I also competed in San Diego this winter but luckily it was on the beautiful campus of University of California San Diego and the surrounding woodlands.No cactus comb was necessary. Nancy and her husband were also there.

The next weekend I participated in a Los Angeles OC meet.

Seems pretty well anywhere one goes in the southern part of the States through the winter one can find orienteering. Since early December I have participated in four 'O' meets in three States and have four more meets in three more States scheduled before the end of March.

Ottawa OC well represented on the podium at Sunday's 'Raid the Hammer' event.

Ottawa OC was well represented on the podium at Sunday's Raid the Hammer event. The Jetsons (Emily K., Robbie A. and Randy K.) finished 2nd Coed and 3rd overall, Team Salomon-Sunnto (Eric K., Andrew Cameron and his brother Pete) finish 2nd Male and 4th overall. Super Aquatic Monkeys (Molly K., Adela & Sabastian Danciu from the Stars) finished 1st overall in the 10k race. Solomon Bobkittens (Carolyn Connell and Nicky Cameron from OOC and Leanne Meuller who comes to our meets from Milton) were first in the women's category and 11th overall.

Below is Mike Waddington's email sent to the Canadian National Team email list.

The 9th annual Raid the Hammer was a huge success today. 95 teams of 3 lined up at the start line (we sold out for the first time) and ran, trekked, and crawled over a rather grueling 26.5km course with over 1,200m of climb.

The race was won in 3h20m by Mark Adams, Lyza Pye and Paul Trebilcock. But what was especially awesome to see at this year's race was the strong performance by teams with juniors on them.

The top 10K (more like 12km) team overall was a team made up of two 14 year olds and a 15 year old from OOC and Stars (Molly Kemp, Sebastian and Adela Danciu)!

In the 25K Raid the top male team (2nd overall) included 17 year old Serghei Loghvin (GHO). 3rd overall and 2nd coed team had Ottawa superstars Robbie Anderson and Emily Kemp racing with Daddy Kempster and finally the 2nd male team and 4th overall was Salomon Sunnto led by Eric Kemp. Our Salomon sponsors were raving about Eric's navigation for hours after the race! Great job Eric.

So three of the top 4 teams at the Raid had juniors leading their teams. A great way to showcase some of Canada's top orienteering stars to the adventure endurance sports scene here in southern Ontario.

A special thanks to Wil Smith that captained the Canadian Running Magazine team today. He raced with the owner and editor (aka the Joggler) and we're hopeful this will result in some good press for orienteering in Canada's premiere running magazine next spring. Thanks Wil (and Nevin for setting up this opportunity).

Full results will be online later this evening. Maps are already there for y'all to look at.

http://www.dontgetlost.ca/raid/hammer2008.htm

Sad news from the de St. Croix family

Pat passed away peacefully this morning (Sept. 20,2008) with her family at her side. She was 81 and is survived by her husband Dick, four sons and many grandchildren. The family will be sending out information about a celebration ceremony of her life in the near future.

For those of you who did not know Pat, she was a pioneer for orienteering in Canada and served as president of the COF for many years in the 1970's. She and Dick started the Niagara club and when they moved to Ottawa in the early 80's they provided boundless support for our club through mapping, clinics, and event management.

But most of all, we will miss a wonderful friend.

Bill & Gloria

OOC takes top honours at 2008 Canadian Orienteering Championships

The Ottawa Orienteering Club, with 31 entrants, took top honours at this year's Canadian Orienteering Championships held in Fundy National Park, NB. Taking 36 medals in all, 14 of them first place medals, OOC was soundly ahead of any other club in the country - hometown Moncton with 27 entrants taking 23 medals being the closest contendors. Of special note were Laura Teutsch, taking 3 firsts for the second year in a row, and Emily Kemp, who, running up by 4 years, placed first in sprint and third in middle and long against the best women in the country. Other first place winners were Alex Teutsch, (middle and long); Brian Graham, long;, Molly Kemp, middle (second in sprint and long); Bill Anderson, middle; Michael MacConaill, sprint and middle; Marketa Graham, sprint; Gord Hunter, long and Richard Aronoff, Open5.

As a warm-up to the championships, participants took part in the Fishbones - a three event, low-key, fun event in Saint John and then ran the ocean floor at Hopewell Rocks. This event proved very popular as participants sprinted amongst the pillars and tourists in a race with the Fundy tides. How do you tell one pillar from another?

See full results at http://www.orienteering.nb.ca/coc2008/index.html, a summary of OOC results highlighting top 3 Canadians and look for pictures on Flickr - tagged COC 2008 orienteering and at http://orienteering.smugmug.com

Here is a crossword about OOC at the COCs

National team sends its thanks on a very interesting sprint map

The National senior team has sent OOC its thanks for the support we have given to the high performance program. This map is from the Womens Sprint qualification - 3 courses on one map!

Click here to see full size map

JWOC results

The Junior World Orienteering Championships (JWOC) started Monday 30-June in Gothenburg, Sweden, with the Sprint distance. The Ottawa Orienteering Club has two competitors representing Canada in the events. Runners from 37 nations are competing. Emily Kemp did a fantastic race in the sprint and placed 38th out of 127 competitors, with a time of 15.04. Winner was Emma Klingenberg from Denmark in 13.40. The course was 2.6km long. Robbie Anderson came 124 out of 173 competitors with a time of 16.50 on the 2.8km course. Stepan Kodeda from the Check Republic won in 13.21.

In the Middle qualifier race on Wednesday, Emily came 10th in her group with a time of 30.46 while the winning time was 26.53. Robbie, with the strongest of the Canadian men's results, was 43rd with a time of 39.34. The winning time there was 27.04.

You can find full results, maps and route choices of top runners and follow the events live at http://www.gmok.nu/jwoc2008/index.php

The Canadian Junior Team has sent a postcard to OOC to thank us for our contribution to the support of the National Team. An image of the card follows:

Juniors end season by going loopy in Pinhey Forest

The OOC Junior Squad completed another successful training season with a fun exercise in Pinhey Forest south of Slack Road followed by a pizza dinner at Pizza Hut.

The training exercise focused on precision map reading, practicing control taking with Sport Ident punching, and improving speed & flow into and out of the control sites.

Twenty-one controls were placed in a 1.6 km loop, many on very similar features close to each another. There were four different maps. The first three maps had 7 controls each; the forth map had 10 controls. The objective was to travel around each of the loops as fast a possible.

Runners were able to practice on the first three loops with rests in between loops. All were running for gold on the forth & final loop DDD.

Below are the times of the juniors and coaches on the final loop.

	Robbie	8:17
	Emily	8:38
	Randy	9:48
	Jeff	9:55
	Adrian	10:32
	Molly	11:50
	Alexander	12.:25
	Stefan	13:04
	Alex	14.32
	Kim	15:08
	Victor	17:25
	Ian	20:11

Two of our juniors, Emily and Robbie, will be heading to Gothenburg, Sweden for the Junior World Orienteering Championships from June 29 to July 6. Results will be posted on the JWOC website at: www.gmok.nu/jwoc2008

Editor's comment -- well done Juniors - Good to see you beating the Dad's. Watch out Adrian - your turn next!

Newest Orienteer - Dylan Revells

We had a healthy baby boy last Tuesday, May 6th. Dylan Christopher Revells weighed in at 8lbs and 1oz. He is adorable! Keeping us busy for sure. We're all doing great (besides being a little tired). Cameron is enjoying his little brother as well (he was very happy to hear the baby was a boy!).

The photos are from when he was a few days old.

Cherie and Mike

- Cherie and Mike

Charles Caccia

Ottawa Orienteering loses a friend.

Charles Caccia took up orienteering while still a Liberal MP and continued participating after retiring from politics and living in Ottawa. Member of Loup Garou and erstwhile active member of OOC he is remembered as a true gentleman and friend of the environment. He was a strong environmental advocate while an MP and in the years following. He encouraged meet organizers to be careful of environmental issues when planning their courses.

He will be missed by all who knew him. Our condolences to his friends and family.

See McGarry Family ChapelsMcGarry Family Chapels for picture and visiting information.

Training Maps

I appreciated Randy's efforts to set up a permanent course on the Cité- des-Jeunes map. Until the flagging tape vanished, I used my crumbling copy of that map year round. Snowshoe orienteering was great but the GREEN in mid-summer was nasty.

For training, I use my old race maps. However, members of our club do too good a job at removing the tape during control pick-up. For those of us navigationally challenged, our training is so enhanced by the confirmation of that tiny little piece of flourescent tape.

Is it possible that once a year we can leave the tape out on one of our events in the Gatineau? If the tape survives that year in the wild, I'll collect it.

I would expect users to pay for the printing of extra copies of the maps of that particular event. However, we could save on that expense by simply leaving that one map available on our web site for the year.

What are your thoughts?

David Agar

dagar@ncf.ca

Anza-Borrego Annual Desert O-Fest

Each Martin Luther King long-weekend in January, the San Diego Orienteering Club organizes a two-day A-Meet in the Anza-Borrego Desert in California. This year it was January 19-21. The Anza Borrego Desert is the largest desert in California. It is generally lesser known because it is a State Park rather than a National Park. It is located about 1½ hours east of San Diego, 1 hour south of Palm Springs, and just west of the Salton Sea.

The area in the Anza-Borrego desert mapped out and used for the meet was Buttes Pass. The location is about one mile off the main highway on a sandy road. Day one used the eastern part of the area and day two used the western part. Of the two days, day one was by far the more difficult. In U.S. orienteering meets, colors are used to denote the level of difficulty. I registered for open courses Orange (intermediate) on day one and Brown (short-advanced) on day two.

The area comprised steep gullies, ridges, and cliffs, all covered by loose rock. Considerable care needed to be taken not to slip, especially when going up and down the gullies. The similarity of the features each day made navigating a challenge. Properly reading the contour lines was critical. Visually, one ridge looked like the next. The terrain was very different when compared to Gatineau Park: no ponds, no power lines, few distinct trails, and the landscape each day was fairly constant - day one had essentially no vegetation, and day two had small scruff. On day one I took my time and was careful not to slip, but on day two I moved a little faster and walked into a couple of small cacti. I was not wearing shin pads, and it was a challenge pulling the cacti out without getting them stuck in my fingers.

The weather was fine for orienteering. It was cool in the morning and evening, near the freezing mark, but once the sun was up, the temperature reached 65-70 Fahrenheit which was comfortable. Many participants camped out at the site. I stayed in a motel about 20 minutes away in the town of Borrego Springs. I met a lot of interesting people there. Most were from California and adjacent states. There was one couple from British Columbia who were vacationing in California for the winter.

Given the risk of injury from the terrain and the distance from a city, a number of additional safety procedures were in place. During the weekend, officials from the San Diego Fire Department volunteered their first aid services. In addition, a group of radio buffs, also from San Diego, took up position along the tall cliffs to monitor the participants.

Overall, I enjoyed my desert orienteering experience. Given the choice, however, I prefer the forest.

Richard Aronoff

National Team Member and Ottawa native, Jon Torrance, also took part in the Anza-Borrego meet and sent this report

Having heard very good word of mouth for past editions, I also made the trek to San Diego, in my case, from Washington, DC.

I ran the blue course both Saturday and Sunday as well as a sprint on Saturday and the Maze-O on Sunday (more on this later). It wasn't a very good weekend of orienteering for me technically but the terrain was both fantastic and otherworldly - moderately to extremely complicated spur and reentrant terrain, mostly rocky. Saturday had very complex route choices and a high risk of losing contact and making a parallel error (which I did, massively). It was very fast sandy terrain with mostly more subtle spurs and reentrants and a high risk in places of having the ground crumble under your foot as you ran through an area of prairie dog burrows.

Then, on Sunday, the Maze-O, a low key and aptly named score orienteering event in a stunningly complex area of eroded badlands, cliffs and slot canyons often barely wide enough for a single person to pass through, with the walk to the start being through the deepest slot canyon in the area.

There was some risk of picking up cactus thorns both days. In retrospect, I'd say running in shorts was ideal from that point of view since it left less for the thorns to grab on to, though wearing shorts involved a compensating risk of losing some skin if one fell on a bare rock slope - and also of dehydration if one didn't drink enough more than usual to compensate for the extremely dry air.

However, these, and a few not quite perfectly hung controls, were minor problems in an extremely enjoyable weekend of orienteering. I'd recommend it to anyone in Ottawa in the mood for an orienteering vacation in the middle of winter (hey, it's cheaper than flying to South Africa, Australia or New Zealand).

Looking forward to seeing fellow OOC members at the US Relay Champs and other spring A meets, including the Canadian Team Trials in that by now to me exotic terrain, Gatineau Park and its environs - much thanks for deciding to host the trials and thereby forcefully pushing Ottawa into my orienteering travel plans after several years of conflicts with other events semingly every time OOC hosted an A meet.

Jon Torrance

OOC Shines in Buffalo Meet

Desert-O/Sand-O

Ottawa OC well represented on the podium at Sunday's 'Raid the Hammer' event.

Sad news from the de St. Croix family

OOC takes top honours at 2008 Canadian Orienteering Championships

National team sends it thanks on a very interesting map

JWOC results

Juniors end season by going loopy in Pinhey Forest

Our newest Orienteer - Dylan Revells

Charles Caccia

Training Maps

Anza-Borrego Desert O-Fest

OOC Shines in Buffalo Meet

Desert "O"/Sand "O"

Ottawa OC well represented on the podium at Sunday's 'Raid the Hammer' event.

Sad news from the de St. Croix family

OOC takes top honours at 2008 Canadian Orienteering Championships

National team sends its thanks on a very interesting sprint map

JWOC results

Juniors end season by going loopy in Pinhey Forest

Newest Orienteer - Dylan Revells

Charles Caccia

Training Maps

Anza-Borrego Annual Desert O-Fest

National Team Member and Ottawa native, Jon Torrance, also took part in the Anza-Borrego meet and sent this report