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Point Pinole — BAOC Sprint Championships

Date: (Sun.) Mar. 5, 2006
Location: Richmond, CA
Event Director: - 510.779.8808
Course Setter: Steve Gregg
Type: C; BAOC Sprint Championship, plus White, Yellow, and Orange courses

Course Setter's Notes

By Steve Gregg

Welcome to the BAOC Sprint Championships. This is the eighth year the sprint championships have been held here, and it's an appropriate location, since the open, flat, and not-too-technical terrain will let the speed-burners in the club really show their stuff! The fastest runners in the club are capable of running under 5 min/km here, especially if we have good weather leading up to the event. This year the terrain is likely to be soggy and relatively slow, though, due to all the recent rain.

Note: This will be an all-epunch event, even on the White and Yellow courses. Don't forget your stick, or bring an extra $3 to rent one.

Courses

The map is 1:10000 scale, with 2.5-meter contours. Here are the courses available at the event:

  Course                  Length      Climb     # of controls
  ------                  ------      -----     -------------
  White                   3.1 km       60 m          10
  Scout/Yellow            3.3 km       65 m          11
  Orange                  3.6 km       70 m          12
  Junior Sprint Champs    3.3 km       70 m          12
  Prologue                2.7 km       30 m          12
     (This is Championship course #1.  There is an UNMANNED
      REMOTE FINISH 1.0 km from the staging area.)
  Chase                   2.6 km       60 m          15
     (This is Championship course #2 -- first start around 12:45.
      There is a REMOTE START 1.3 km from the staging area.)

White: Easy navigation on trails. For beginners and younger children.

Yellow: Every control is less than 50 meters from a trail, and most will be visible from the trails. However, the course is designed so that, in many cases, there will be much shorter off-trail route choices to the controls, across mostly open terrain. This course should be very good practice for advanced beginners. It is also specifically designed to be an appropriate, challenging course for the JROTC and scout groups.

Orange: This course is of equal technical difficulty to the Prologue and Phase courses — in fact, it shares several controls with those courses. You should run this course if you are an intermediate or advanced orienteer, but do not want to participate in both parts of the Sprint Championships.

Junior Sprint Champs: We are offering a Junior Sprint Championship course for the first time this year. Runners under 18 years old are eligible to complete. The controls are all of White/Yellow level of difficulty. Medals will be awarded to the top three boys and the top three girls on the course.

Prologue and Chase: The starts for the Prologue will be first-come, first-served, just like a regular event, but you need to start no later than 11:45 or so in order to get back in time for the chase. REMEMBER: AFTER THE FINISH THERE IS A 1.0 KM WALK BACK TO THE START!!! Your start time for the Chase will be 12:30, plus however much time it took you to complete the Prologue. (So, for example, if Eric wins the Prologue with a time of 15 minutes, he will be the first person to start the Chase, with a start time of 12:45. Everyone else's starting time will be based on how far they are behind Eric in the Prologue). The first people to cross the finish line at the end of the Chase will be the winners of the event.

Potential Dangers

Ticks (the ranger says there are many of them in the woods), small pits and depressions hidden by tall grass, fallen and/or logged eucalyptus trees that can easily trip you up. (I suggest you wear spikes or cleats instead of running shoes, especially if it's wet.) There is little poison oak in the park, and it usually takes the form of big bushes that can easily be avoided.

Weather Issues

It looks like we will be back to the more usual Point Pinole swamps and mud this year, after three years of relatively dry conditions. The per-km times will almost certainly be slower than in previous years as a result.

Make sure your shoes are well-tied, as the mud can suck them right off if you step into a really bad spot!

Map Notes

Contour-line anomalies: For reasons that even Bob doesn't seem to fully understand, the Point Pinole basemap came with many tiny, seemingly random contour line bends that don't correspond to reentrants or spurs in the field. I have smoothed out a lot of them, but have not had time to check and fix every single one. Due to the very open terrain, this will not cause any navigational problems, but you'll probably need to take a different mentality from most of our ultra-hilly BAOC maps. On most of our current maps the tiniest contour line bend could well correspond to a huge reentrant or spur in the field, and we all have learned to think accordingly. On this map, however, a tiny contour line kink may well represent nothing at all.

Vegetation mapping: Good thing this map is on OCAD! At Point Pinole they perform eucalyptus logging and brush burning on a regular basis, and this activity dramatically changes the nature of the vegetation from year to year. Thus this map will never be "complete" — every year new field-checking will need to be done to try to keep the vegetation mapping as accurate as possible. In addition to this, it was very difficult for me to accurately represent the different thicknesses of the eucalyptus in the forested areas. My basic color scheme was this: Light green for eucalyptus thick enough to be difficult to run through, white for "normal" runnable forest, and in the areas where the eucalyptus was dramatically thinned out but not completely removed, I used the "rough open with scattered trees" symbol. Unfortunately the darned eucalyptus grows back up so fast that after a few years have passed, the previously thinned-out areas start to look a lot like normal white forest again. So don't expect to notice major differences between the thickness of the vegetation in the forested areas.

Like the Montebello map, this map uses black dots to separate the different grades of whites, yellows, and oranges. These dots are there solely to improve the readability of the map — you should not necessarily expect to see "distinct vegetation boundaries." Now that we are using a better printer to produce our maps, these black dots are perhaps no longer necessary, but I have not had the time nor the inclination to remove them and make a test printing.