PreO Relay Demonstration Event

Well, I'm home now, but never got around to blogging on the Demo event we did on Saturday. This was a tryout of a new format -- a relay event for PreO. Each team had three members and a three hour time limit to solve 24 control problems total. Each member of the team was required to solve between 7 and 9 problems of their choice. The last member gets the leftovers. The map is below.

For Team USA, Steve went first. He headed Southeast to controls 11-16, which were in a picnic area. Then he moved to the west, where he chose to skip number 10 and solved 7 and 9 before coming back in for a handoff to Sharon.

The handoff was interesting. Each team had four control cards stapled to each other, so that you punched through them all. Steve tore off the top control card with his punches on it and passed the rest to Sharon along with the map. Then he went to complete the single timed control.

Sharon went north to controls 17 through 24 and then I completed numbers 1-6 and 8 and 10.

Since this was a demo event it was not up to typical Championship standards. The map was slightly out-of-date and the setting was not perfect, but it was fun. I think it would have been more exciting with a shorter time limit. The Finnish team was done very quickly and I don't think that the three hour limit really put anyone under time pressure.

Each of us missed two problems for a total score of 18. Top score was 23 by a combined Estonia/Spain team. Our place was 22nd of 33 teams taking part.

Thanks for following us! I hope to keep this blog going through the year with training ideas, news from US competitions and more sample controls to keep you thinking.