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Point Pinole Regional Shoreline

Date: (Sun.) Mar. 16, 2014
Location: Richmond, CA
Event Director: - 925.862.2978
Course Setter: Steve Gregg
Type: C; Middle-distance courses for beginners and experienced orienteers


Course Setter's Notes

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We are definitely looking at the best weather in the history of the Point Pinole event, with the forecast currently showing a 0% chance of precipitation, and afternoon high temperatures approaching 80 degrees. Come out and enjoy running traditional, Middle-distance courses. Actually, the navigation is not technical enough in most places to warrant the "Middle-distance" designation​—​perhaps "long Sprint" would be more appropriate, since the terrain is as flat and fast as ever. Our fastest runners are capable of running 5 min/km in this terrain.

The course lengths are unchanged from the preliminary statistics, and are repeated below. The maps will all be printed at 1:7500 scale, with 2.5-meter contours. Here are the course details:

    Course           Length    Climb   Controls
    White            2.6 km     50 m      10  
    Yellow           2.5 km     50 m      10
    Short Orange     3.5 km     60 m      17
    Medium Orange    4.4 km     80 m      24
    Long Orange      5.5 km    100 m      30

Due to this winter's record-low rainfall, there is virtually no standing water in the park, so you will not have to worry about unmapped swamps, or even about getting your feet wet. However, some of the open fields are still covered in tall grass, and between that, the uneven footing, and the fallen eucalyptus trees and other deadfall, I suggest you run with cleated shoes or spikes.

There is one water control on all the courses, and the Long Orange course also passes right by a water faucet (between controls 10 and 11) that will be marked on the map. I purposely positioned the water control at a very impressive, newly fallen tree, which may cause you to take a look for a few seconds before moving on. It is also possible that you will encounter unmapped fallen trees. The ranger tells me that a giant tree fell just last weekend, although it sounds like it is in a part of the park well away from any of the courses. Large trees fall all the time in this park, which is usually good, as they create new control locations that did not exist before.

There is a significant amount of poison oak (PO) in some of the forested regions of the park. A couple of weeks ago, I moved a control from its original location due to PO issues, but there are still several controls on all of the Orange courses where you will have to make detours from the most direct route to the controls if you want to completely avoid the stuff, and even the Yellow course has one leg where you will definitely be seeing PO. You'll be able to easily avoid the largest clusters, but you might not even notice the individual shin- to knee-high shoots until you have already run through them. So, if you are very sensitive to poison oak, be sure to take the usual precautions. In particular, in spite of the expected heat, think twice about running in short pants, as I doubt it's possible to negotiate the courses at any speed faster than a slow, careful walk without coming into contact with at least a few individual PO shoots. The stuff grows like weeds this time of year!