1/22/2020 ievenranthisfar IEVENRANTHISFAR An ongoing chronicle of misadventures in trail running and ultrarunning by Andy Pearson 72 Needles In Millions of Haystacks // My First 24-Hour Orienteering Race It’s somewhere around 3:00 in the morning. I’ve been up somewhere around 24 hours. And I’m… somewhere. I just don’t know where. My partner Sean and I have just descended hundreds feet down a sheer rock face that’s dumped us into a pitch-black forest. Above us, a canopy of ancient pines blocks out the full moon. Below, the trunks of their fallen compatriots and an army of younger ones eager to take their place make our travel directionless and nearly impossible. And amid all this, we’re looking for a small, orange and white triangular flag with nothing Archive more than a dot on the map, a compass, and the vague clue that it was located at a “reentrant.” Random post RSS Suddenly, there at the bottom of that cliff, swallowed up by the forest, I felt very, very small. And very, very Ask me something far away from anything. Forget finding the control, I think to myself. What if we can’t ever find our way out of this canyon? Search Are we going to die down here? __ A Little Compass Context This was my first ever 24-hour rogaine orienteering race. I’d been introduced to orienteering a year and a half ago when my good running buddy Guillaume Calmettes invited me to a local event. He was using to sharpen his navigational skill in prep for his first run at the infamous Barkley Marathons. And he convinced me it was super fun and easy to pick up. He was correct. In orienteering there are two basic formats. This first one I did was Classic, meaning you get handed a map of the area you’re in with little numbered dots on it. Then, you have to use your compass to find your way as you run from control to control in a pre-determined order as fast as possible. Beginner’s luck. I got second place. Guillaume got first. The next event we went to the following month, I won. Our compass skills were admittedly only okay. (Actually, Guillaume’s were fine. Mine, less so.) But having experience and fitness as a runner, helped us immensely. Still, we made plenty of mistakes. This year, I made some huge errors in races. It’s really humbling when it takes you 3:34 to finish a course, and the winner did it in 0:57. The beginner’s luck had run out. Most orienteering events are relatively short, usually one or two hours long. But it’s incredibly intense. When you’re trying to find 15 different controls as fast as you can, you have your head buried in your map as you’re sprinting through parks, up and down hillsides and rooting through streams to find your controls. Then Guillaume told me about rogaining. It’s the same thing, except it lasts for 24 hours. 勞 I’ve run plenty of ultras that last longer than 24 hours, and I’ve done some orienteering races for a few hours, but I didn’t know you could combine the two. It sounded bonkers. https://ievenranthisfar.tumblr.com/post/187822454271/72-needles-in-millions-of-haystacks-my-first 1/16 1/22/2020 ievenranthisfar (For the record, the name rogaine comes from a portmanteau of the sport’s founding members’ names. It has zero to do with a fix for male pattern baldness.) Guillaume and I talked wistfully about one day competing in the World Championship. Then, two months ago, I got a text. The North American Championship was taking place at the Nav-X Challenge in a month, in the Sierra National Forest. The top two teams would go to World. So we signed up. Lake Shaver, near the course A few days later, Sean Ranney reached out to Guillaume to see if he could join the fun. If you don’t know who Sean is, he’s an incredibly accomplished runner who holds the Tahoe Rim Trail unsupported FKT. He’s also the creator of a Barkley-style race called Euchre Bar Massacre every October. He’s legit. Then, with just two weeks to go before Nav-X, Guillaume ran into some problems with his visa and had to return to France the day of the race. Sean and I were incredibly bummed to lose G, but we decided to go on and do the race. “Do it for Guillaume!” we said. “Or to rub it in his face!” We hadn’t decided which. ___ What To Expect When You’re Expecting So, this is how I find myself waking up in a tent in the middle of the Sierra, waiting to be handed a map that would send me out into the forest on a very wild goose chase. Camp/a Jeep commercial https://ievenranthisfar.tumblr.com/post/187822454271/72-needles-in-millions-of-haystacks-my-first 2/16 1/22/2020 ievenranthisfar Sunset the night before Full moon over camp Waiting for Sean to show… https://ievenranthisfar.tumblr.com/post/187822454271/72-needles-in-millions-of-haystacks-my-first 3/16 1/22/2020 ievenranthisfar Nine o’clock rolls around. Time to receive our maps. Sean is nowhere to be seen. Nine-thirty. Ten. I look around as other teams scurry to plot their movements and prep their gear for the next 24 hours. Time is running out. Instead of feeling stressed, I’m a little relieved. Maybe I won’t have to do this after all… Ten-thirty. Sean’s red truck rolls into the dusty campground. I guess we’re doing this. In a supremely ironic twist of fate, Sean had gotten lost for hours while driving to the starting area. This does not bode well for our future prospects. We exchange quick pleasantries and immediately get down to the business of plotting our moves. The High Sierra sun already beats down on us as we squat over a stump, with our highlighters and sharpies clenched in our hands. It feels oppressive already. The second type of orienteering is called Score-O. All rogaine races are Score-O. The premise is that there are flagged controls laid out across the course, each assigned a point value based on difficulty to travel to it or find. Rather than racing for the fastest time, everyone has the same amount of time to nab as many controls/points as they can. If you’re skilled enough to get every single control, you’ve “cleared.” It’s a game of strategy. Do you go after more of the easy controls that are closer to the start but are lower value? Or do you try to go out farther and burn time to get higher-value controls further afield? Looking at our map, we have 72 controls. The possibilities are pretty much endless as to how we can design our run. Hell, the map itself is huge. It’s over two feet tall. I’m just wondering how I’m going to carry this thing in front of me for 24 hours. Being novices to this whole thing, Sean and I both frantically googled rogaine strategies in the week leading up to the race. Interestingly, it involves office supplies. So on drive way up the previous day, I had found myself in a Staples somewhere in the Valley buying various brightly color writing utensils. First, we highlight all the high-value controls on the map in yellow. The locations of water drops we highlight in pink. It quickly becomes apparently that the northeast corner of the map has the highest concentration of 60, 70, 80, and 90-point controls, but they’re spread further apart, and the terrain seems to be more forested, meaning navigation and travel will be more difficult. Also, there’s more water. The southern portion of the course has the next highest concentration of points. It seems to be more exposed rock which will be faster nav and travel. No water to speak of though. The northwest sector is denser in the number of controls but they’re lower value. The correct plan seems fairly obvious (I think). We decide we’ll make a big loop of the northwestern segment first while we’re fresh, it’s hot, and we still have sunlight. Then, we’ll loop back to the hash house (the start/finish area), resupply and head out on our second loop. This loop will take us to the south overnight, where it should theoretically be easiest to navigate and we won’t need much water. Then, we’ll head back to the hash house for another resupply and go out on our third loop to pick off as many easier, lower-point controls as we can before noon tomorrow. (One thing to factor into strategy is the penalty for finishing late. In this case, we’d lose 10 points for every minute past 24 hours that we’re out of the course. So you also want to plan the end of your race to have points where you can call audibles towards the end.) https://ievenranthisfar.tumblr.com/post/187822454271/72-needles-in-millions-of-haystacks-my-first 4/16 1/22/2020 ievenranthisfar Marking up the map With our basic game plan laid out, we quickly start penciling in lines of travel from control to control. Again, more strategy. This time we’re trying to make each move the shortest possible while also hitting every control and simultaneously avoiding any overly difficult moves due to a giant mountain between them, dense forest, whatever.