Discussion: How many CPs is too many CPs?

For the 5th anniversary of Race the Phantom, I have decided to cut back on the number of CPs that teams will be required to visit. My intention is to make the race more of a distance event with teams racing from Point A to Point B with only one or two CPs between TAs. The only out and back sections will be created by racers who may have taken the wrong turn.

Anyone have any comments or thoughts on the topic?

thanks for the feedback....

cheers
Troy

I like it! I'm a big fan of the 'journey' concept for adventure race design - that being that we're racing to get from place to place to place. Sometimes out-and-backs are unavoidable (stupid geography not cooperating with course design) but I'm not a fan of them. "I'm here at this TA and now I have to bust my butt for the next eight hours... to get back to this same spot??"

A low number of CPs = good idea. I wouldn't say that makes it a "distance event" though. Taking out intermediate CPs should make it an "interesting route choice" event.

True Bash, however less time spent on out and backs will allow teams to travel longer distances?? There might be some flaws to that logic, but I will see as the details are worked out I guess. :)

OK, I see how you meant it. Point A and Point B can be further apart. Still, I'd focus on the idea of route choice, and distance will fall out of that as a side effect. Out and backs aren't as good for route choice since you get two chances at the same route, so you probably won't include them anyway.

It will depend on the course NSAR. Send me your maps with your notes and I'll let you know what I think. ;^P

But seriously, so long as you'll still be able to manage the gap between the fastest and slowest teams, why bother having CPs at all unless they are taking you to awesome spots like plane crashes and century old Oratories!

42

If there are no CPs, how will you know we're not just chilling at the farm for 40 hours?

I second the point about route choice. And similar to managing fast and slow teams, you might want to have enough CPs to give less experienced teams a chance to verify their nav now and then (although I suppose the SPOT will tell you if they've been traveling toward Maine for 36 hours).

What I am planning/working on is a discipline with one or two CPs to influence route choices, and dropping the O course option all together.

I am not saying that there will be no advance CPs, there may be one or two during the race that may encourage a larger loop of the course as opposed to an out and back option to get the CP. I have some pretty good 'tracks of land' (Python reference) to send racers over this year and am curious how many teams will sabotage their finish with taking on too much.

Basically, it doesn't sound like anyone would be too disappointed if they didn't have a ton of CPs to retreive for the sake of getting a CP......this is good, less clean up. :)

I almost answered 42 as well!
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Kelly? Our Kelly?

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NSAR, with respect to disappointment... you've been satisfying racers for four years, that's the last thing you need to worry about.

disappointed if they didn't have a ton of CPs to retreive for the sake of getting a CP

Quite the opposite!

personally, and that's just my preference, love those races with an overamount of CP, so many that confusion and panic kicks in during the last 40 minutes in a "rogaine"-style race. My motivation is the opposite of yours: not make it a distance event, but make it more technical. I've been at a race with 50 CP and got to the finish thinking that I found all but one, but then, looking at the control card, realized I missed two additional ones. In this case, the "mental" part of the race was affected, and indeed lost mental focus as I brushed 50 meters from a building behind which was a CP (which I forgot about). If a race has too few CP, are near trails and roads, and there is little navigation involved, then basically it's just a off-road half-marathon. And that kind of race bores me. Just my humble opinion.

I think your are talking about two different things... navigation vs orienteering?

In an AR give me huge distances (20, 30, 50+ kms) between CP's. Lot's of choice and the challenge is to 'out' navigate the competition.

In orienteering have loads of CP's, and it becomes all about speed and a different type of strategy.

We have done some epic trek's (up to 120 km) between CP's and if those had been broken up by many CP's I would not have enjoyed them at all... they would have become tedious and boring instead of adventurous .... but maybe that's just me :-)

The nature of the area around Race the Phantom's HQ (Dalhousie, NB) is such that Point A and Point B could be 10 km apart and you'll have at least three distinct and reasonable routes between them.

There will be plenty of navigation.

in response to this:

>CP, are near trails and roads, and there is little navigation involved

FB wrote this:
>I think your are talking about two different things... navigation vs orienteering?


navigation vs. orienteering???
Unmm, I don't follow!?. I've been orienteering for over 30 years and sure thought I was navigating. I applied the same navigation skills from orienteering to AR and won 24 of the 26 races under 18 hours that I raced in (2nd in the other 2). ;-)

I think both of these posts are mixing up the different aspects of 'navigation'. Part of that blame might be because a lot of people in Canadian AR drank the Dave Zietsma cool aid where he made comments that orienteering wasn't "real navigation". I never bought that crap but a lot of people did. Different orienteering courses test different "navigation" skills. One can divide those into 'precision nav', 'rough nav' and 'route choice'. Precision are short legs to small features while 'rough' nav are longer legs where one need not know where they are at all times. Instead in rough nav it is about moving through the terrain efficiently to 'bigger features' and perhaps this is what FB refers to as 'adventurous' and 'navigation'. All types of nav can involve 'route choice' though that is generally greater as the longer the leg gets but not necessarily. It all comes down to the course planning and making the most of the terrain that one is in. Lots of route choice can occur on legs between CPs that are 120km long or 1.2km long. It all depends on how the leg between CPs is planned.

I enjoy all aspects of 'navigation' in an 'orienteering' race or AR but I don't think it is fair to say that one type of nav skill is more 'real' than the other. Rather, my preference is to involve the most 'decisions' per CP the better.

Another Zietsma'ism was "orienteering is like looking for a needle in a haystack". Breaking his point down using navigation terms and skills suggests he is referring to the fact that orienteering involves 'smaller features' for CPs and has more precision nav. Fine, thats a skill that may or may not be important in AR but it doesn't mean that orienteering doesn't have route choice and that it isn't 'real navigation'. The fact is that a well designed long orienteering course should involve all skills. FYI, my response to Dave on that comment was "give me a map of the haystack and I'll find the needle".

Anyway... if I were to ever plan an adventure race I would take the same approach as I do in designing championship orienteering races. Find the key 2-3 looonnngggg route choice legs that the terrain/map provides and set those first. Then connect those route choice legs with additional CPs and perhaps visit a nice historical site or nice vista along the way as well. Determining the best placement of those CPs on those 2-3 long routes requires testing the course a couple of times and possibly moving a checkpoint a little west or east or north to maximize route choice. It also means showing the course to a few people that aren't going to do the race and have them draw the route they would take. There is nothing worse than designing a leg that has lots of route choice but people all go the same way. It means that 'visually' it didn't appear there was variety because participants didn't "see" the other options. A course planner then needs to tweak the course by adjusting a CP location a bit here or there to make more of the route choices 'pop' off the map.

Having said that some of the best 'route choices' I had in AR were a Zietsma designed course. My fave was his 2001 Bark Lake RTN course. Sounds like the Race the Phantom will take the same approach and the brief look I had at last year's Wilderness Traverse offered similar route choice enjoyment.

So I think this thread isn't really about how many CPs and I don't think this is an O vs Nav thing. Rather it is about designing a course that maximizes route choice, while still promoting much 'rough nav' adding perhaps a small touch of precision Nav here or there thing.

How would you "out-navigate" somebody on this leg of this "orienteering" course?
http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5564/vagval3.jp...

I'm pretty sure that NSAR was just looking for feedback on whether participants appreciate rogaine style sections in the race versus a more stretched out race. Likely the same distance traveled more or less, just more area in the latter. Therein lies the question on quantity of CPs.

The general consensus around here seems to be less rogaine style more old school AR style. I do fear that many of the people who don't like rogaine style sections on an AR have just had experience with poorly designed courses, and ambiguous scoring. I think that remote CPs (I don't like calling them rogaine sections because it implies rogaine rules) can be a great tool to ensure racers experience the race the RD wants them to see. You can't have a staffed CP at every cliff, waterfall, ruin and plane crash! (Yup... CP at Race the Phantom '09 was at the site of a plane crash... AWESOME!)

The out and backs / clover leafs and so on do get boring, but when you've got a well setup course where all the remote CPs are required (or some are specified as advanced to offer some racer ability control) then you can put together an awesome race.

Tangent time...

I can think of a dozens ways an experienced navigator could best someone on that orienteering course... am I right? ;^P

AR and orienteering of course are both navigating. I do believe that they are very different though. That is, a good orienteering navigator isn't necessarily a good AR navigator or vice versa. Both require experience.

I do have a theory that ARers typically do better at orienteering than orienteerers do at AR. I've started a few blogs on the idea, but I always lose myself because there are too many inconsistent variables to offer a case I could defend with much success. Note that I was an orienteerer ~15 years before I did my first AR!

Sure both require experience but both are based on the same skill set. One needs to know what navigation skills to draw on and when - and that of course involves experience. sometimes that skill set is simply reversing what one would do in O vs AR. In O it is necessary to simplify the map and ignore the map details while in AR the map is already simplified requiring one to ignore the terrain details. I would never say they are 'very' different but I realize why people would want to say that. there is comfort in people in different sports to say they are different from each other. I personally don't view it that way at all though I realize southern Ontario may be unique in Canada with such a great cross over between sports giving us a great variety of endurance navigation based races.

Your theory on who does better is an interesting one but it is hard to define 'better' because that is a function of the quality, what physical training one does,etc. orienteers need to be able to run fast and execute nav skills very very quickly. stopping to read the map can't be an option to have success internationally. But one can gain reasonable success domestically in orienteering using the stop and go slower running speed approach. I think it is fair to say that adventure racers in north America are closer to the top internationally than noram orienteers are to the top internationally. Ive raced at international races in Ar, rogaine and O so feel comfortable saying that. Having said that there is of course way more depth in orienteering internationally because it is solo and a bigger sport. so an apples and Oranges comparison.

Interesting that you mention region, map quality varies considerably depending on your local. Here in the Maritimes we're luck if we've got base topos that were made in the last 15 years... and ATV / logging roads and trails appear and disappear by the year. We struggled for a while in New Hampshire two years ago because the maps were so good! That is where my theory comes about, it's a fair statement here in the Maritimes that the best AR map is worse than the worst O map. (Quality meaning accuracy.) So we often see first time ARers coming from orienteering who end up with a lot of WTF trouble where first time Oers from AR have less of a hurdle coming into orienteering.

But you're right, defining 'better' is almost impossible given sample size and the number of variables.

totally agree with you on the WTF troubles. In our nav clinics we use O maps deliberately altered to allow people to train that WTF aspect. Unfortunately O map quality for a lot of areas in southern Ontario have become worse recently. I guess it makes it all the more better for AR and O crossover. ;-)

New navigation term: WTF trouble. Established 2/17/2011 on www.ar.attackpoint.org. Definition: dealing with ambiguity surrounding out of date / inaccurate maps.

Where's that feature?
WTF!

I think we need a 'LIKE' button on here. :)

:-)

>from Hammer
navigation vs. orienteering???
Unmm, I don't follow!?. I've been orienteering for over 30 years and sure thought I was navigating.


I knew I should have put an ** on that or I'd get called out. I agree with what you said, but a lot of people with less experience than yourself see 'ALL' orienteering as precise nav and 'ALL' AR as rough nav... and for some reason the terms seem to have become different and distinct ...primarily with the AR folk I think, and maybe because of DZ here in Canada?? :-) ......

I guess my point was that more or fewer CPs is a function of what you are trying to accomplish. For me - in AR I want a start and finish and as few cp's as possible - in O races I like more vs less 'CPs'.... but all those other factors weigh in.

... pretty much what has already been stated above...

@Andrew (O9Man) -- this may be the only time somebody has ever stated that the maps in Untamed New England territory were 'so good':

"We struggled for a while in New Hampshire two years ago because the maps were so good!"

I'm speechless (nearly!)

We're actually looking at using just sat photos for some sections of Untamed New England 2012 because the topo maps are such bad representations of the terrain. Nobody surveys that US/Canadian border territory, so the maps are 25 years old or worse . . .

To the broader topic, about "micro" or "macro" orienteering and the balance of how many CPs should be in a race, I have always voted for minimalism. Of course, sometimes you HAVE to put a checkpoint at a mountain summit to force route choices that steer a team in a specific direction; some of the best course desicions I have ever made were in pruning back the quantity of CPs, however. Less is most certainly more!

It's true!

Sometime I'll put together some examples of what we have going on here. Fortunately in the last ~3 years new surveying helped out in a few of the worst areas that I often use for races.

It would be an interesting article too... I'll add it to the list.

WARNING: It might be a stretch to consider what FB does with map & compass in hand as either 'orienteering' or 'navigation'. 'Bumbling' comes to mind, no? Urthbuoy? Care to weigh in? No commentary about a certain beginning trek to RtN Huntsville, however...BAAAAAAAAZING!

If my aging memory serves there was also an 'ending trek' in Huntsville not to long ago where a certain Phatty had a SUBSTANTIAL lead going into the final trek/orienteering section.... help an old fella out, who won that race? :-)

... but at least I had enough confidence in you at a 'certain beginning trek' that I didn't send the search and rescue looking for you - to save you any form of public humiliation. I can't believe Leanimal still married you after that! :-)

.. people who live in glass houses....

... should dress in the basement :-)

I love AR trash talk.

Oh no, not THAT 'certain beginning trek'. :(

Sorry, I couldn't read your post as there was a 'Bob the Beaver' trophy blocking my view of the screen...

Hey, hold on...didn't you do Wilderness Traverse, too? BAAAAZING part II !!!!

Thanks for the input guys and gals.....and I agree with O9Man....nice to hear some AR trash talk.