Training Log Archive: barb

Random notes from the week of orienteering:

• Two great hugs from Valerie.
  
• Mikell Platt never talks to me. He must hate me because I'm dorky or something, which is perfectly reasonable.
  
• Some nice smiles from Cristina.
  
• I could go on with many additional specific examples, but will just say that I loved seeing old and meeting new orienteering friends!
  
• The junior juniors were great together! Go junior juniors! I am hoping that USOF and our US Team will spend some time and attention on these younger, promising and enthusiastic kids.
  
• I like night and long orienteering.
  
• I appear to be allergic to Colorado - lots of sneezing and itchy eyes. By the end, I even had asthma that I'm now having trouble shaking off.
  
• What a great way to spend time with family! (My parents, aunt and uncle, brother, niece, nephew, kids, ...) Maybe I can get everyone to converge on Cobb CA in October. On Sunday I realized I had a lot of people in my family troupe because when we gathered to get coaching from Uncle Carl for the relays, there were enough of us to make critical mass: other people thought this might be some official announcement and started wandering over and joining the crowd, and soon they were raising their hands and asking questions too. :-)
  
• AWESOME orienteering! Thanks to all who made it happen!
  
• I love how capable people are so responsive and just make good things happen. Like John F & Valerie doing the junior junior relay. And Phil, Brendan, Nancy and others making a success of the junior junior training camp. And the Peaceful Valley cafeteria manager who helped us with whatever we asked her for.
  

C • Congratulations 7

Sprint is not my thing. Had trouble with a couple controls.

Walked the white relay course with the young cousins, David and Doug on their third leg.

John Fredrickson and Valerie Meyer are just so... competent! They did a super job of including an easier course for the younger kids at the last minute. 6 teams (18 people) participated, so it was worth it! And, my niece and nephew got their first real taste of official orienteering, with number bibs and everything. John created this extra course at the last minute; I only talked to him about it the day before. Yet by the time the relays started, the kids were fully integrated: their maps were available along with the original relays maps; they started at the same time, etc. And Valerie did the e-magic necessary to allow seamless use of electronic punching.

John F really throws a great party - the relays were super fun, and everyone loved the punching races afterward.

C • Relay 1

On the way out of town, we stopped at the dinosaur museum.





Went to Red Rocks for the String Cheese Incident farewell concert. It was SO GREAT!!!!!!!!

Ah, the long-O. This *is* my thing. Lovely runnable woods. Mmmm....

C • Your thing 2

Awards ceremony









David couldn't get his admiring younger cousin Charlie to stop orbitting around him.

Short-O is not my thing.

A nice evening get-together of junior juniors and their families.







Piotr, Mom, Dave, Alar


My brother Doug, Aunt Linda, Uncle Carl

Travel day. We went to the Garden of the Gods and did part of the Trail-O. It was hot.

We went on to the Olympic training center.



David, Charlie, Isabel, Julia, Theron, Lucy

Picked up some night-O controls early in the morning. Got to see the very nice sunrise from the plains. Got a ride from Rich Gostenik in his british landrover type car; he had fun going fast and we nearly busted right through a closed wire gate. I love being out with a map on gorgeous terrain early in the morning.

I had thought that it might be fun to try out my "mass transit-O" or "bus stop O" game at junior training camp, and talked about it with a few people. I got discouraged and decided against it when J-J said he wouldn't participate, but changed my mind and went ahead after he relented, and others showed interest. So we did it! And it worked!

5 adults were busses, each walking a different line-O (their "route"). Along each route were 5 bus stops, with times at which the bus was scheduled to leave each stop. The bus could arrive early at a bus stop, but could not leave early.

The 5 teams of kids each had a map showing all the bus routes, stops and schedule. Their task was to intercept each bus once. (I will post the map when I get a chance.) In other words, it was like a score-O with precisely timed moving controls. The teams had a little time to plan their strategy before starting. If they arrived at a bus stop early, they could walk the line-O backwards to find the bus. And if they arrived late, they could run the line-O forwards to catch up to the bus.

Brendan was one of the busses, and was able to leave one of his stops just before a team got to him, because it was time, and they had to chase him to catch him.

All 5 teams found all 5 busses. No bus was caught by all 5 teams much before the end of the bus line, so the timing worked out well. Teams got practice working on strategy, doing line-O, off-trail navigation, and in some cases reorienting. And some people even said it was fun!

I want to do it again. I'd been thinking of doing it on a larger scale in September for my 80-student junior high outing. And maybe we could try it in Pawtuckaway?

The kids continued to have fun playing together outside of the official junior junior training camp.

Night-O. Came in first, thanks to others struggling, and my ability to just keep plodding along slowly and steadily. My headlamp was highly inadequate; just before the race I gave away a couple other lights to people in our party. I could barely see the stuff on the ground at my feet - reminded me of biking in Vienna when the bike lamp was weak. I could have gone faster if I'd had a better light.

Doug and Dave were razzing me about orienteering better at night - they suggested I try closing my eyes during daytime orienteering.

Nice long hike with John and Dave in Castlewood Canyon. Gorgeous. Can't figure out why I don't have any photos. Didn't I take any? Hm.

Interesting to see the powerful downstream effect of the sudden release of water when the dam failed.

There wasn't any organized activity at the convention for kids age 8-13, so the parents got together and created one; Brendan Shields also helped. We had Stephen & Nicole Koehler, Julia Z, Isabel, David, Maya Rounds from Boulder, Zach Lyons, Adam (Phil's son), Julia Doubson (7 years old, from BAOC), Tiivo & Aanika Ruutopold, and Scott. Christoph Zurcher let us use the yellow and orange controls from the weekend, and we got leftover orange maps to use.

Today we started off with Bob's 100-meter pace-counting exercise. We held a discussion about what was easy and hard for the kids on their courses from the previous day, and what skills they were interested in working on. Then we focused on fine map reading with a line-O designed by Brendan, meant to emphasize the ability to read contours, and a reorienting exercise by Phil, where we took the kids out into the terrain, then gave them a map and asked them to figure out where they were and get to a specific control location. Some of the kids were into it and others were hot and tired and a bit whiny by the end of the reorienting exercise when it was time for lunch. My kids were among the latter group.

In the afternoon, the kids played together and were not bored or whiny at all! The older girls in particular (Maya, Nicole and Aanika) have a magic touch with the kids. They were very inclusive, and suggested and organized all sorts of games like capture the flag and murder and so on. The main goal for me was for my kids to become better friends with other O kids, so that they'd be more interested in going to A-meets, and this goal was fully met! Yay!

In the afternoon some of us went horseback riding.



Julia Z.

Skipped the first ("progressive") Zero-to-Orange exercise, because Dad and I had early start times and it didn't work to change them.

For the orienteering, really felt the heat and altitude and was moving slowly.

Early start so I could go to the airport and meet Theron, arriving with the Koehlers. Pulled a 180 coming out of 3. Lost a lot of time on it.

Last day of Zero to Orange. Took the final exam.

In the afternoon, we tried out archery:




Isabel throwing the atl-atl

Day 2 Green A - Splits

Didn't feel like going out on blue, the way I'd originally planned, and did yellow instead. Not sure of my time. Definitely was moving slowly; walked the whole way. Hot!

The first musical bookend to our time in Colorado. Went to Elbert with Dave Enger, John Lee and Dave to see a local band. I liked the lead guitar best. Dave E stayed and talked to that guitar player afterward, and discovered that he knows the guitar player in String Cheese Incident - they live just 12 miles apart.

Day 1 Green 1 - Splits

Event: 2007 USOF Convention and Colorado 5-Days
 

First day of the Zero to Orange in Three Days class. I took this as a "trainer", though my participation was pretty much identical to that of a "student". Which was fine - it was a very useful course for me, both in terms of my own orienteering and thinking about how I'd like to teach kids.

My kids, parents and partner (Dave) all took this course too.

The first day there was classroom lecture, and an orange-level score-O. I finished in just under the alotted hour, and was surprised to find I'd gotten more controls than Dave. I was glad to see the rest of the family safely back. Isabel had done particularly well, getting the high-score controls without much trouble.