I was genuinely surprised – and of course pleased – at the positive reception this experimental “Virtually O-Mazing” format received. For instance, no one at all told me it was a bad idea; a compliment in itself. But more than that, several people went out of their way to say it was an especially good idea, and one couple told me it was the most fun they’d ever had at an orienteering event. And even with light attendance, there was quite a crowd hanging around for hours talking about the ins & outs & strategies, etc. Heady stuff for this happy, and relieved, course-designer.
Disappointingly, only 61 people showed up to find out just how much fun new formats like this can be. It might have been the August heat, or the weather report calling for thunderstorms all day, or the many warnings/admissions I circulated beforehand, telling everyone that the map quality was growing worse over the years. Whatever the reason, there still seems to be enough interest in Wickham Park to warrant continuing the annual August event there. It’s just that we really have to update the trails and the map somehow. Any volunteers?
Back to the report…
The weather was fine, for Florida, in August. It was humid but the temperature topped out at about 89F, the sky stayed overcast most of the day, a breeze favored us more often than not, and all rain held off until control retrieval time at 3:00 p.m.
Thanks go to the helpers, especially Dave Shuman & Ken Richard who were there at 8:00 am sharp. Ken even made an emergency run to the Copy Store for extra maps when I discovered my supply of maps was partly an out-of-date version. Toby Henson and Mitch Jarvis ran start/finish and the Titusville JROTC cadets were on hand for nearly everything else, including helping Joe Maliszewski’s control retrieval. Thanks to all.
For those of you who missed it or were not following the flurry of emails on FLO’s Yahoo Groups site prior to the event, here’s a thumbnail of what we did.
Introductory Course: For newcomers and the shy veterans, we offered a single Introductory course that I called “WhiteYellow”. It was just a little harder than a normal white course and went into the tangle of trails & palmetto that Wickham is (in)famous for. It served well, too for Titusville’s first time cadets whose training was to do the course as a group first, then run it alone, in reverse. We normally tell people never to visit orienteering course controls in reverse order because it either makes it too hard or too easy. As it happened, this WhiteYellow course was indeed more difficult in reverse, so in this case they all had a good day’s training and it worked out fine.
Virtually O-Mazing: The event was, first, an O-maze, that requires some explanation. It’s something like a Score-O event, involving visiting a large number of controls in any order. In Score-O the controls are assigned varying point values and your task is to maximize your point total in a limited amount of time. In the case of this O-Maze, there were 25 controls and you could visit them in any order. However, on your first visit to each control you do not ‘punch in’ as you would normally, but rather you accumulate clues to help you identify the one true Final Course embedded within the Maze. Once you decipher the clues to learn the Final Course sequence of controls, you then visit those controls, in any order, punching the correctly numbered boxes on the control card just as you would have on a regular course.
That’s complicated enough, but….
Since I’d created an O-Maze for FLO three years ago, I thought veterans might be bored unless I added a new wrinkle or two. This year’s wrinkle #1 was to insert what I called a Virtual Control into the sequence of the Final Course. You do not visit this Virtual control on the first go-round of clue collection, but two of the clues will point to it as being on the Final Course sequence. “Aha”, you might say, “That’s simple”. But wrinkle #2 is that the master map actually shows three candidate Virtual Controls, only one of which is the correct one to be visited. The rule for selection of the correct Virtual Control is to select the one which yields the shortest Final Course route if you were to visit all Final Course controls in order.
Got that? There will be a quiz.
Note that the team of Dave & Ken won handily, because they figured out immediately that one person must navigate while the other person is working on the clues, on the run. You can’t do both, so teams might have a real advantage here.
There were 25 controls to be visited, plus three Virtual controls, all shown on the map, just as for Score-O events.
The O-Maze clues consisted of 3x5 cards attached to each control, telling you which one, or two, or three, adjacent controls you are permitted to move to from this control; just as though the control at which you read the ‘clue’ was a square in a maze and the presence or lack of walls in the maze would permit you to move to one, two or three (rarely, four) adjacent squares. For instance, the clue at control AG might read: “Go to LA, TT, OH”.
Visualize a 5x5 maze made up of 25 squares. One of the controls will have the Start, and one will have the Finish as an allowable movement, so you would know that these are the first and last controls, respectively. When considering all of the allowable movement clues collected at all the controls, there will appear one and only one sequence that leads from Start to Finish: The Final Course. All the other sequences will lead to dead ends, just like in a maze.
Wickham is well suited to something like this because Wickham itself possesses what most of us refer to as a “maze of trails” in the NE quadrant. In all it only covers about 1 square kilometer, although the Wickham Park map itself is 2.5 square kilometers. I set the controls so that an optimum route to visit all 25 of the ‘clue’ controls would be about 4 kilometers. Then the Final Course itself was chosen so as to be about 3 km. So course-setters can appreciate that a fairly small area is involved; in fact necessary. Few FLO venues have enough detail in a small area to allow this sort of course design. I didn’t want to overextend anyone in the August heat but even this plan called for 7 km of total orienteering to complete the course.
The phenomenal winning time for Dave & Ken of 78 minutes is worthy of applause. Congratulations, guys.
Congratulations, also to Keith Patillo, who really won the WhiteYellow because Matt Mahoney had already finished the O-Maze when he ran it, and all controls were common. Congratulations to all the WhiteYellow top finishers who turned in excellent times.
Notables this day: The dead heat of equal times by the Metzenroths and Rebecca Stelida really happened. Note also that Mitch Jarvis and Renae Blevins deliberately visited only the 25 controls as a Score Course and didn’t plan to do the Final Course. Jamie Sheriff only failed to finish the Final Course because we started pulling controls when she’d been out less than 2 hours. I cannot explain why Richard Patillo and Alisha Vaughn & The Bates mis-punched the same control (#2), so I’ll list their elapsed times in case a good explanation turns up.
All in all, a pretty satisfying day. I’m glad you all enjoyed it.
| Name | Time |
| Matt Mahoney | 13:00 ** |
| Kieth Patillo | 23:45 * |
| Brenda Weis | 24:56 |
| Teresa Murphy | 25:50 |
| Jack Stahlmann | 27:40 * |
| Mikel Moschillo | 32:00 * |
| Jamie Campbell | 36:30 * |
| Durkin Group | 43:00 |
| Van Heden Group | 47:30 |
| Titusville #2 | 50:30 |
| Titusville #1 | 52:30 |
| Scannell Family | 61:02 |
| Gough Family | 61:55 |
| Metzenroth Family | 62:10 |
| Rebecca Steliga | 62:10 |
| Meredith Carsella | 88:40 |
| Myers Family | 112:19 |
| Name | Time |
| Shuman/Richard | 78:03 |
| Chris Johnson | 96:00 |
| Ron Eaglin | 106:20 |
| Toby Henson | 113:20 |
| Matt Mahoney | 122:03 |
| Jeff Hunker | 126:25 |
| Joe Maliszewski | 127:48 |
| Chizlett & Lively | 137:30 |
| Jataya Taylor | 158:30 |
| Lane Sheppard | 158:50 |
| Adam Johnson | 162:59 |
| Carolyn Clayburn | 210:30 |
| Carter Secoth | DNF |
| The Handlins | DNF |
| Janie Sherrif | OT |
| Vaughn/Bates | DQ |
| Richard Patillo | DQ |
| Jarvis/Blevins | DQ |
| Andy Horn | NTR |
| DNF | Did Not Finish |
| DQ | Disqualified (Missed Controls) |
| OT | Over 3 Hour Time Limit |
| NTR | No Time Recorded |
| * | Second run, reverse order |
| ** | Second visit to controls |