First Orienteering Race
This past weekend a friend and I competed in our first orienteering competition. At the Manitou Park Event, hosted by the Rocky Mountain Orienteering Club, we competed in the orange (intermediate) course. Originally we planned on doing yellow, but we were goaded into doing orange by the guy at the sign-up table. We’re glad we did, it was just the right amount of challenge to really whet our appetite for this exciting sport. Finding the first of 9 checkpoints was almost deceptively easy. Finding the second one took us almost a half hour. After finally stumbling across second CP, with a clue from a racer on a different course about where we might be on the map, we decided to pay more attention to our bearing as we traveled across the convoluted terrain. Every checkpoint after that went much better. I imagine if we hadn’t wasted so much time on that second CP we would have placed around 2nd instead of 4th. It was a great time, jog/hiking the whole way through brush, pine trees, and around the several recent mountain lion kills.
I was glad I wore pants and hiking boots despite the temps topping out above 80 degrees. Andy just wore shorts and was not very happy. His legs were very beat up at the end. People online always recommend trail runners, but I prefer boots. Crunching through sharp fallen tree branches and scrambling up and down steep embankments, I think in the end I would rather have the reassurance of thick rubber and leather wrapped tightly around me from toe to ankle. My knees are weak and after about 30 minutes of running my ankles are pretty weak too. I know my body has to work less to move trail runners that weigh half what my boots do, but this is Colorado, I would like think my feet have to put up with slightly more abusive conditions here than people down there deal with.
Anyway, Andy was a great team-mate, and I definitely want to do this again. I feel something that is rare for me, a competitive spirit, a need to improve my time, a desire to reach the top of a list. An attitude I never was willing to allow myself to have during school sports because of my own perceived athletic inadequacy. Now I see what this is all about. This is a great sport, thinking, navigating, map reading, and just plain slow running. It’s a blast.