Swanson Rd

RouteGadget and splits on both WinSplits and Attackpoint are all online for this event.

We had beautiful weather for orienteering at Swanson Road. It was warm but not too warm. A gentle breeze helped to keep the sun from warming things up too much. The nice weather probably contributed to the large increase in the number of participants this past weekend (161 starts) over last year’s event (98 starts). Roughly half of the participants were QOC club members. Patuxent (28) and Herndon (10) High Schools NJROTC programs combined provided a large number of the non-QOC participants.

Big thanks to everyone that pitched in and helped to make this event work:

Dwight Johnson, Suzanne Izzo, John Landers, Ioana Fleming, Jay Gelman, and Don Fish got everyone registered and handed out maps and clue sheets. Ioana Fleming also helped by adding streamers to a section of the white course that was a little thicker than one usually finds on that level course.

Jeff Haskell and Diana Todd provided instruction to beginners.

Jeremy DeBons helped direct parking.

Jon Torrance, Tom Nolan, Iliana Shandurkova, Lacho Iliev, Videlin Aleksiev, and Dave Levine picked up control flags and punch boxes after everyone was out of the woods.

Valerie Meyer, Amy Louden, Dan Do, Dave Onkst, and Karla Hulett got everyone started with e-punch, collected their results and made sure that everyone was back safe and sound before we packed up and hit the road. Thanks also to Amy for bringing home-baked cookies.

Thanks also go out to Mike Newman for helping to pack up the club's gear and supplies at the end of the day.

- Dave Levine, Meet Director

It should be added that, though he wasn't present at the event, Dan Quinn deserves thanks for his course setting labours as well. This despite some issues with the courses, including a significant portion of the white course taking people through some unusually unpleasant vegetation for a beginner level course, at least a couple of controls that seem to have been slightly misplaced and at least one control in a Bermuda Triangle-ish part of the northeast fringe of the map where the contour base Dave Linthicum worked from didn't come close to fully representing the reentrants arrayed along a slope and he didn't lavish as much effort correcting them as he did in the more central areas of the map. These issues weren't entirely unanticipated - on Sunday morning before the start window opened another member pre-ran the Green course while I vetted all of the white, yellow and orange controls then ran Red early in order to try to catch any problems before they affected large numbers of people - but our efforts to address them obviously weren't sufficient. I don't want to write a novel about what we may do to avoid problems like this going forward but please accept my assurances that measures it would be reasonable to take to ensure course quality at our local events are a live issue the club leadership will be discussing and my apologies if your orienteering experience at this event was negatively affected.

- Jon Torrance, QOC President