We ran a clinic and a night Rogaine this past weekend, and both went off well. I always feel like there isn't enough time to cover everything I want to in these clinics . . . we originally planned a full weekend "adventure racing camp" where we'd have 2 days of interaction, instruction, and conclude with a 6 hour race at the end of the second day
but like many of our grand schemes the demands of a real job and schedule issues prevented us from putting all the pieces together. It's just as well, because I think 2 full days would burn out the participants so that by the end they wouldn't get nearly as much from it as from these shorter, more focussed clinics.
Anyway, the Rogaine was fun;
you can check out the Rogaine results if you're curious. The Richmond ASR team (two of my teammates for next weekend) really tore up the course but came back 5 minutes too late so, in dramatic fashion, Tim Dunkum from Richmond was the overall winner. His team won the
Sproute 2006 short-course, so he probably takes to this navigation stuff pretty quickly; he was also at the clinic earlier in the day, so maybe that helped. Maybe.
More important than who won, the 30 or 40 people out there (teams in size from 2 to 5) all seemed to have fun and there were some smiling new faces along with the smiling old ones. That's always cool.
For the night orienteering, the classic orienteers out there would've liked to see glow sticks on the flags but I feel like that makes things fairly easy for the terrain that we're working with. If we had more space, then glow sticks might make more sense. We work hard to hang controls on significant features, especially at night, so that it isn't a complete easter egg hunt out there . . . but we don't want everyone to have a cake walk either. It's always a balancing act.
What are your thoughts on night orienteering and illuminating CP flags (glow sticks, reflective tape, etc)? I know official orienteering rules say glow sticks, but in the adventure races I've done the night orienteering never uses glow sticks to "give away" control locations. For the
Storm 2006, for example, we have no plans to light up the CPs for the night portion.