Mike Poulsen and David Irving named US Trail-O Champs

Open Gold - Mike Poulsen; Open Bronze - Gavin Wyatt-Mair; Para Gold - David Irving

Mike Poulsen took the Gold Medal in the Open Class and David Irving in the Paralympic Class at the US Trail Orienteering Championships held Saturday, August 9 in Colorado. Mike was the only competitor with a perfect score of 14 controls. Sharon Crawford set 16 controls, two of which were voided by the Jury after a flurry of protests. For the first time, the US rule imposing a 1/2 point penalty on competitors who file a losing protest was applied. Five controls were protested, two of these were voided, two were deemed reasonable protests and the penalty was waived. Only those who protested number 10 were penalized.

Full results

USA Trail-O Champs Preview

The 2014 Championships are a few hours away. The course set by Sharon Crawford with Peter Goodwin as vetter promises to be challenging. Seven US team members will be competing along with other highly ranked Champs eligible competitors. TempO World Champ Martin Jullum is also registered, which will certainly elevate the competitive level. Watch for Team members on the course wearing their spiffy new uniforms.

The event asked for a waiver from the official OUSA rules to operate under current IOF rules. The timed controls will be one station with three problems and will count only for time and not for points.  Speed will be of the essence as only 30 seconds per problem will be allotted with a 60 second penalty for incorrect answers.

About 25 people brushed up their skills at the convention today. I led a workshop that included a presentation on various trail-O solution techniques. Workshop attendees also had an opportunity to try a demo TempO station and a few other field exercises. Anticipation is high for tomorrow's competition.

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.

Day 2 Disappointment

Prior to Day 2 of the PreO we had a team discussion about strategy. The model event and the previous events tended to be fairly straight forward. In particular it seemed that the course setters were not setting very many Z problems where the flag was slightly off in some way. We discussed being careful about choosing Z and favoring choosing a flag. Well, it turned out that this day was definitely different. The three most missed controls were all very tricky Z answers. It seems many competitors were lulled into a sense of security by the model event.

Team USA had a very poor showing. Steve redeemed himself with the best US score of the day (15 out of 20). Sharon had 14 and Clare had 13. The median score, however, was 17. We dropped quite a bit in the overall standings. Once again some soul searching and thinking about how to train better for next year.

A Very Tight Trail-O

Day 1 was shortened due to poor trail conditions from yesterday's rain. 19 controls turned into 12. The result was very close results. More than half of the field was within two controls of the leaders. Sharon Crawford had a phenomenal showing with a perfect score except for a slow time due to missing one timed control. Clare missed only two and had a decent timed control time. This still put her about halfway down the results list. Apparently there was a control thrown out due to a protest, so we are waiting to see how that affects Sharon's placing. She was in 4th with that control correct.

Control of the day: a pair of Zs

Control 5 was pretty tricky. Flag B was on a nice looking spur between the forested areas, but a detailed look at the map showed the small reentrant between two spurs there, so you could determine that the further spur must be correct.

Control 6 was fun. Sharon was all the way over at the fence, thinking it was the far wall, when she realized she had gone too far. The green was very low hanging coniferous branches. A single control was visible under the low canopy and clearly on a wall. But some careful identification of the knoll and deep look under those branches from the right vantage point revealed the shorter wall -- without the control.

A Rainy Model day

Today was the first model day for PreO. If you've been watching the foot races you know how wet the sprint relay was yesterday. At least they get to run and stay warm. It's a little colder when you're just standing there getting wet. The terrain was very open fields with many depressions -- remnants of bombing from WWI. Trying to determine which ones were the mapped depressions was the order of the day. There was also a huge wall from a WWI fort. It was a really cool, historic spot.

Sharon and I both had excellent results with me getting everything correct and Sharon missing only one. Sharon said the terrain was excellent Alpine terrain and would be great for some X-country skiing. Oh well, wrong season.

Control of the day -- 4, 8, 9 cluster

Number 4 was an A control, meaning you just had to determine if that one control was correct or not. Controls 8 and 9 show how complicated the terrain could be, with some depressions mapped as such, while others showed up on the map as minor reentrants.

Photos of Fort Verle

That was hard!

TempO Qualification - Albere de Tenna

An extremely technical TempO today. The terrain was full of ditches, knolls, and other detailed contour features. Almost every problem was based in these types of features. USA results were pretty poor. Clare had the top US result, with a score of 779, but that was 51st place out of 57. For comparison, the top qualifying result was 231.5. There were six stations, each with four problems to solve. The maximum time at each station is two minutes. Your score is the total time you take at the stations plus a 30 second penalty for each control you get wrong.

Control of the day: station 5

This station was the bane of the US Team today. Between the three of us only one correct answer was given. You could see the hill to the right, but trying to identify each separate knoll in those ditches and determine how far down the hill things were was very difficult.