OTNT at Tamarack

Posted Wed, April 15, 2009 - 11:24 PM
orienteering, navigation

Another Tuesday night training as the spring weather just continues to get better. This time it was at Tamarack Nature Center on Tuesday the 7th. We all met in the parking lot between 6 and 6:30 PM, and did another "Scrabble-O" like the one Ian set up at Lake Elmo last year. Tamarack has a permanent orienteering course with control labeled A-X, so as each of us arrived, we shook up a tub full of 24 Scrabble tiles and drew 10 consecutive control letters. The training event was to visit them all in the order we drew them. This was also billed as "Scrabble-O plus", so Ian enlightened us by specifying that we had to drop and do 10 pushups at each control, for a total of 100 on the night.

Map and analysis below the fold.

Map of April 7, 2009 OTNT course - Click to enlarge

(The orange stain at top is Tabasco sauce, acquired after I got home.)

After drawing the letters, we all jogged out to the central start location south of Tamarack Lake. There were about a dozen regular OTNT participants - a good turnout on a nice 50+ degree day. Ian did his usual spiel, talking about the rules and rapidly adding on a quick "GO" when people weren't expecting it - but I was ready and immediately ran down to the south lake trail and around the western boardwalk to my first point, K. That was a quick run, with gearjunkie right on my tail, and then I had to dogleg back along the boardwalk to pick up L, where I saw Molly. Then a third time along the boardwalk to P in the north central part of the map and over to H by the parking lot.

I hit my usual slowdown right around this point; for the first few controls I can usually sustain a 5-6 min/km pace (in open venues; less for more vegetated maps), but have to back off on the pace after the first 10-15 minutes. Nevertheless, the ability to go out fast is often what gives me a gap on the competition, so I'm happy to try to take advantage of that in my strategy. (Of course, the nature of this event, with everyone on their own course, kept it from being relevant today.)

After H, my choice of letter forced me into bouncing back and forth between the east central and southwestern areas of the map. Numerically, controls 4, 6, and 8 were over by the parking lot, and 5 and 7 were over by the water tower. I mostly ran trails on this part of the course, looking up to the sky, since that seems to A) improve my oxygen intake and B) fool my brain into thinking I'm floating on air. From H to T, I decided to take the safe trail route rather than risking a straighter route with a creek crossing, but made sure to notice the crossability for use on the T-I-U-O sequence. It wasn't good - the ditch was pretty wide, so I was glad not to have taken the risk (later confirmed by discussions with others).

I bounced back and forth to O (I was a little tired of those trails by then!), and saw Tom coming in just as I finished the pushups at O. After that I only had three more in the area near the visitor center. I quickly ran up to F, which had a broken punch, and cross country to C before taking the trail back to the boardwalk and around the east side of the lake to the finish.

The total course length was 6.9 km, in about 45-46 minutes (not including pushup time). Jerritt and Will were already back at the finish, and we waited for everyone else to come in as the sun set. Good time and good practice - I'm really happy that we have such a motivated, active group of people.