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Anthony Chabot Regional Park

Date: (Wed.) Jul. 27, 2005
Location: Oakland, CA
Event Director: - 510.681.6181
Course Setter: Rex Winterbottom
Type: C; Evening Sprint; starts from 6:00-7:00 pm

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Event Write-Up

By Rex Winterbottom

Much has changed since this map was drawn in 1980 by Bruce Wolfe off of a USGS base. I somewhat rehabilitated the antique black and white "run, walk, fight" vegetation-coded map so we could have a somewhat fair sprint event. I added a category — run in a maze of coyote brush. That covered most of the terrain on the course, although 2 legs afforded participants the opportunity to slip and slide through some eucalyptus forest deadfall. And the really thick "fight" vegetation encroached on some areas of the course as well.

This was stripped-down, stone age, waaaaaaaayback-machine orienteering on a funky chopped up version of this old map, featuring a 1:5000 blowup of the usable terrain and assorted bits and pieces from the original map combined with a handwritten clue sheet. Real old school, D.I.Y. kinda stuff. I seriously cobbled together these maps at the copy shop down Redwood Road in Castro Valley the day of the event after making some changes to the course and map when hanging the control bags.

Battles with unruly plants and some tricky parts of the map foiled my predicted winning time of 24 minutes. Inspection of the results reveals narrow margins between some of the places. Every second counts in a sprint! Tapio Karras almost stole victory and the 30 sprint points from Francois Leonard. After looping around the mysterious #2 cliff, Vladimir Gusiatnikov scrambled to 3rd place. Bruce Wolfe, the map creator, showed up very well against the younger bucks, but almost slipped out of the top 5 at the finish.

This was a small labor of love, and I express my heartfelt thanks to the 22 folks who showed up — many from the South Bay, Peninsula, and North Bay (if you call San Francisco the North Bay). You graciously managed with the rather spartan event registration, start, and finish run out of the trunk of my station wagon. And I appreciate the help with packing it up, control pickup, and checking the results.

Results: Bob Strauss, Jim Fish, Thorsten Graeve
Packup: Thorsten Graeve, Dan Greene, Tony Pinkham
Pickup: Bob Strauss, Mikkel Conradi, Vladimir Gusiatnikov, Francois Leonard, Marie-Josee Parayre

Results 

Anthony Chabot Regional Park
Evening Sprint

Oakland, CA
Wednesday, July 27, 2005

  Pl  Name                   Time

   1  Francois Leonard       26:35
   2  Tapio Karras           26:40
   3  Vladimir Gusiatnikov   27:17
   4  Thorsten Graeve        28:32
   5  Bruce Wolfe            28:55
   6  Mikkel Conradi         28:56
   7  Andrejus Masalkovas    30:21
   8  Werner Haag            34:21
   9  Dan Greene             35:55
  10  Alex Saltman           37:20
  11  Marie-Josee Parayre    40:00
  12  Chad Davis             40:13
  13  Simon Wakeman          40:56
  14  Russell Neilson        42:13
  15  Tony Pinkham           43:39
  16  Bob Strauss            43:55
  17  Peter Graham           44:02
  18  Jim Fish               50:55
  19  Peter Graube           54:48
  20  Alak Ghosh             55:54
  21  Nancy Lindeman         82:05

      Deron van Hoff          DNF

_______________

DNF = Did not finish (missed one or more controls)