Orienteering 2:56:15 [3] 6.8 mi (25:55 / mi) +2825ft 18:36 / mi
Brandywine Creek - Red
2014 Mid-Atlantic Orienteering Championship
20 controls; 6.7 km; 190 m
Actual Distance Traveled: 10.9 km
Actual Climb: 861 m
I orienteered once before at Brandywine Creek but that was in 2006 and it was in a different part of the park, on the other side of the creek. Pin punching was used at that orienteering meet. I wore a backpack that day. One of the zippers came undone while I was working my way through some thick vegetation and my cell phone fell out. I didn't realize I had lost it until I got back. Lucky for me, someone else found it and turned it in, so I got it back. After that I stopped wearing a backpack when orienteering and started wearing a fanny pack. My other recollections of Brandywine Creek were that it wasn't a very difficult place to orienteer although there was a fair amount of thorns.
This time around my experience was somewhat different. The course I walked at the 2014 Mid-Atlantic Orienteering Championship was not an easy course but it also wasn't extremely long. I ran into a lot of other people when I was out on the course, in many cases this made finding controls much easier. There was a fair amount of loose rocks to traverse, which aren't very common in the DC area orienteering venues. Sometimes I took the direct route, sometimes I used the trails. The primary factors that helped me decide whether to use the trails or not were the climb involved and the density of the vegetation.
The weather was beautiful, just cool enough but not too cool. I rode the team bus up to the meet. I did not participate in the relays.
Note
More thoughts about Brandywine Creek...
I'm not sure how they measure climb on these orienteering course but something seems wrong when I look at amount of climb I actually did (861 m) versus the amount in the course description (190 m). The two numbers are almost never the same but I expect the variance to be less than that.
For that matter the distance of the course also seems a bit wonky. I walked 10.9 km but the distance in the course description is just 6.7 km. I usually cover 20-40% more distance than the straight line distance but this time around it was 63% more than the straight line distance. I didn't feel like I wandered much or had trouble finding the controls. Other folks led me to or helped me to find 9 of the first 11 controls. After that I was more or less on my own. I did stick to the trails a little more than I usually do. That may be the reason my actual distance traveled is so much greater than the course straight line distance.