Discussion: Meet Feedback

Hope everyone had a good weekend. Any feedback, good or bad, would be great. Any and all comments help us improve our meet for next year.

Loved the weather, courtesy of the cadets, organization, map accuracy. I got a good physical workout and came home no more broken than I arrived. :-) Thank you to all the cadets involved to make the weekend run smoothly.

Because this is an A meet, sanctioned by OUSA, it should adhere to OUSA rules. The ones I noticed that were least followed were refreshments on the courses (A.24.12) and course lengths (A.20).

Water on the course is specified in the rules and there should have been more stops for some of the courses. I carried my own supply and wasn't affected but heard from others who were. And I was one of those Brown course competitors who had difficulty climbing up on Eagle's Nest and then getting back down. Not an appropriate point for us.

Calculate climb by hand, figuring optimum route for each course (not necessarily the straightest line) and counting only the ups, multiply the number of contour lines counted by 5. You'll get much higher numbers for some courses than you advertised this year. Then keep the (climb/course length) around 4% (ideal) to maybe 6% max. Adjust lengths accordingly.

Please follow course setting guidelines more closely, particularly for the Brown courses, but also to get proper course lengths for the conditions in the woods. Day 1 woods were much slower than the "white map" depicted because of the widespread blueberry, and times for some courses reflected that fact.

I know there are some great areas of West Point and do enjoy challenging myself on your maps, and hope to do so again. Another set of experienced eyes on the course design is a first step. It's too bad your offer to have courses pre-run was the same weekend as the Billygoat....

Are two day results published anywhere by class?

I think Janet has articulated the main points quite well. For my course, Green X, I thought the length and amount of climb was okay. But, the climb was misrepresented being about twice what was advertised. To be honest though, I thought that the advertised amount must be wrong even before I started. Also, just looking at the course lengths for Day 1, Brown and Red seemed as they would be too long.

I did think the cadets were particularly helpful, cheery, sociable and pleasant. Not that they haven't been in the past but they just seemed more so this time. Nice.

I will also say that I liked the opportunity to stay there at Round Pond and I think a number of folks took advantage of that. Thanks for making the arrangements.

Generally good weekend aside from the mentioned length, climb and blueberries. Appreciated being able to camp and Round Pond was very nice. We had a beautiful site.

A couple of details of concern:
1. Start times were changed during the week and the new list was linked to AP. The packet and bib times for some reason were different. I assumed the bib/packet time was correct. Wrong! My Sunday bib time was an hour later than the start list on top of the mountain putting me with a long run in the heat of the day.
2. Not all bad as during the wait I discovered a tick embedded in my shoulder. Hurried out to the medical crew at the start wearing a vest with many pockets. A search yielded no implement for a tick extraction.

The medical kit should have a full supply of needed medicine and bandages and tools with knowledgeable users. Your area is widely known to be a tick habitat and equipment to deal with them is important.

5K for M75 on day 1 in tough terrain! At the very least M75 should be in Brown Y, not X, although at 4.5K it would not have been much improvement.

Otherwise Janet's points cover it well. I heard tell that one oldie passed his stick up to others to punch for him at Eagle's Rock - definitely not an easy scramble for creaky knees.

Perhaps next year you can get a Brown runner to review Brown courses.

Organization was, as always, excellent.

Love the Cadets, their attitude and everything they stand for - however, most of the courses were simply too difficult. The Orange courses (often the most difficult to set) were particularly off, as fewer than half finished, many didn't start Day 2, there was NO water on the 5.3km course on day 1, and the control placement was mostly advanced. I agree with most everything said above. I think a couple of control locations were actually dangerous for Brown runners (#12 on Day 1 Brown X for example), and several controls were of the "you've gotta be kidding" type (#9 on Day 2 Brown X). The difficulty and slow "running" fostered a "we're all in this together" mentality, with people following and helping others. I benefited from this Day 1 and spent 1 - 2 minutes on Day 2 attempting to help someone. But: love the Cadets, the terrain, the weather, my family's attitude and all the rest of it. Advice: take up Sandy Fillibrown's offer to course consult next year.

I'll preface this with a disclaimer that although I ran Blue (Sunday only), I'm an old man who arguably has no business running that course, so any sentiment I have about the length or difficulty of the course may be irrelevant.
1) Control #4 (78) was described as being between two 1-meter boulders. There were no boulders on the map, and none in the terrain; the control was on a spur with stony ground, which is what the map showed. A minor issue.
2) Orienteers generally don't care for controls where you climb a big hill for an easy control, then come back down the hill on the very next leg. In fact, that's the stereotype of the biggest problem with West Point courses of the past (I'm talking about 30+ years ago). Two of the controls on Sunday's Blue course (#1 and #16) fit into this category.
3) The leg from #11 to #12 on Sunday was too close to the edge of the map. Given that there was a steep hill pushing us to the left, we needed more map to the south. As it was, I went off the map (on purpose), while thinking that the best route might be even further off the map. There was plenty of unused space on the north edge, so the cropping of the whole map could have been slid south a centimeter or two.
4) The walk to the start was 1700 meters, and from the finish to download was about 750 meters. That's pretty far. There are a lot of reasons involved in the decision of where to locate start and finish, and I'm sure there are some that I'm unaware of in this case. For the shorter advanced courses, it does add up to a large increase in the distance that people have to cover. The distance from finish to download is a particular concern of mine; my opinion is that if at all possible, the download should be located right at the finish, such that competitors are funneled to the download with no chance to wander away. When they have the chance to have a drink, then spend 20 minutes walking back, and encounter a barbecue and a bunch of friends before they get on the bus back to parking, it's pretty easy to forget to download. I hope you didn't have anybody who missed it, but it wouldn't surprise me if you did. The solution is either to put the finish near the assembly area (best choice), or to have the download out at the remote finish.

I don't have my maps handy (maybe there's Routgadget - I haven't checked) but I also recall the Sunday Blue course having a control beside a boulder described as 0.5m high that was ~1m high (should have known better - why would a 0.5m boulder even be on the map - but this was after the between two unmapped boulders control JJ mentions above) and another control hung on the east side of a boulder cluster that was described as being on the west side. Small things but things that should be right at at A meet.

Also, I agree with JJ that the courses harked back to an old style of West Point course setting that I've been glad to see the back of - as technically interesting as the terrain is, there should seldom if ever be a control on an advanced course for which nearly all the challenge is climbing up to the top of a hill. And, looking at the courses in hindsight, it feels to me as though a fair proportion of the control were less technically challenging than they could/should ideally have been, though nowhere near as egregiously technically easy/physically hard as the two JJ highlighted.

Are two day results published anywhere by class?

West Point requires all web posting to go through a review before posting, adding delays, so I asked the MD to send me the results to post on the OUSA site.

Thank you everyone for coming out and providing excellent feedback. I can ensure you that next year we will be proactive about enacting several changes.

I would first like to apologize for my delayed response to the feedback; immediately after the A Meet we entered finals week, which, I am glad to say, all the cadets excelled at.

This was our first year without the vaunted COL (Retired) Hendricks after his guidance for many years. As such, we lost a huge source of knowledge on how to organize a national level meet. We were able to adapt with the knowledge we knew, but there were still many fine points that escaped us.

Course design has a very steep learning curve with very little room for error. Even so, we use this opportunity to develop our young orienteerers, particularly those who are trying to qualify for JWOC. Obviously, this has its downsides, but these problems can be mitigated with good supervision from a knowledgeable orienteer.

We did seek out the help of Bob Turbyfill, but we did not utilize his expertise enough. This is evident in everything from the amount of climb on courses, to the difficulty of certain points, to the lack of water, and to certain legs not offering enough route choice. Particularly on courses that are difficult to design for cadets: Brown and Orange.

One point not mentioned is the lack of community presence at this year's A Meet. This is largely due to the remote, start, finish, download, parking and everything. This is a failure on our part. Next year the A Meet will be an event which offers the full spectrum of orienteering: challenging courses and a great community.

I have read and annotated every single comment on this thread and every comment from every log posted. As the West Point Orienteering team captain next year, I can promise that we will not make the same mistakes as this year or any other year. We will do our best to provide the best A Meet possible.

If you have any further comments, please do not hesitate to contact me directly at Thomas (dot) Eisiminger (at) USMA (dot) edu

USMAOC is in a unique situation compared to every other club, in that there's really never more than one person in the club who has more than three years of orienteering experience. Given that, it's truly remarkable what you manage to produce year after year.

With a new slate of cadets every 3-4 years and without a longterm/experienced
coach, course length and climb issues arise over and over again - history
forgotten, history repeated. I would say it's very important to have written guidelines
(accumulated/improved upon over the years) to adhere to and have an active
course consultant every year who will actually visit the terrain to help ensure course
fairness/suitability and compliance with OUSA rules.

I really enjoyed the races this year. Where else will you get a vista checkpoint like those offered up to us on the Saturday and have a cup of water poured by a very polite cadet. Which cadets had to haul all that water up there for us?

Reading this thread got me thinking that USMAOC could really do well with an annual team adventure run race (or mini Rogaine) in true Army style with a combination of orienteering, trail running and obstacles. How about this for a race name?

"The GO ARMY, Beat Navi-gation Run"

(They used to do something like that, some years ago. Around 2001. I think it happened three times. It... didn't go well. Really.)

(That was also before the explosion of the mud runs, which are marketed to military-types, among others. With the right event and the right publicity, it could go really, really, well. But with the wrong event and no publicity, well...)

Which cadets had to haul all that water up there for us?

I actually asked this question when I arrived at that control. The answer I was given was "The plebes."

Wow, Mr. Eisiminger, thanks for paying such close attention to the feedback!