Discussion: CNYO's 22nd Annual ROGAINE

Event details are available here.

If anyone has specific questions on the CNYO Rogaine, please contact me directly at dady@toast.net. Thanks
Pete

Base camp location details have been posted on our club web site - generally it is 1.7 miles north of NYS Rt 23 on Elmer Jackson Rd east of Cinncinatus and South Otselic, NY. Base camp and registration open around 6:00 pm this Friday.

The weather is expected to be warm - in the 80's and the woods are dry. We have 4 water stop/controls and may put out one or two additional water stops along the roads. Dry flies are out but mosquitoes are pretty much gone.

For those doing the 24 hour event, expect some road time between state forest areas. Cell phone service (ATT) is spotty especially in the valleys. Ok on hills. I haven't check Verizon but I hear it should be better.

If you have specific questions, please contact me directly. See you in the woods.

What dry flies?

FDFs - aka deer flies

Sorry - yes deer flies!
We will have 5 controls with water on the map plus one extra that is mentioned in the meet notes. Forecast is mid 80's for the weekend. Chance of rain is small.
Map distribution is after the 11:00 am meeting on Saturday.
See you in the woods!

Chance of rain is small.

So this will be a little different from last year's "Hurricane Irene" edition of the CNYO Rogaine then! ;)

Hence the dry flies...

With repellent, deer flies weren't bad (at least during the 6-hour). Mosquitoes were feistier at dusk.

Thanks to Pete, Sean, and helpers for a great Rogaine! And so nice that the weather cooperated this year -- no hurricanes or thunderstorms!

There was much discussion about misplaced controls at our rogaine. We did give credit for two. We will be credit at least one additional control. If you had problems with a specific control please email me privately off list with the control in question. We will post official results by weeks end. Sorry for the mix up. Thanks for attending.

Several years after the use of GPS became widespread, misplaced controls should not occur. A simple technique is to record each control placer/vetter's route in a GPS logger. These devices are available for well under $100, and can record over 40 hours of continuous data with sufficient resolution. After the data is downloaded, it is overlaid over the map, which should make navigational errors during course setting apparent. If this analysis reveals that controls were misplaced, another setter/crew can then move the controls, given sufficient time before the event; if the crew does not have adequate skills, they can be guided by a GPS. We used this technique at the 2011 U.S. Rogaine Championships, where 5 of 68 controls were initially misplaced by extremely experienced navigators.

The Rogaine Committee of Orienteering USA is happy to provide rogaine organizers with a list of best practices. Events that apply for, and receive, sanctioning by Orienteering USA are assigned a Course Consultant and an Event Consultant, whose help and input usually make it even less likely that misplaced controls should happen.

And none of this is perfect. The 2006 NA Rogaine Championships had a disputed control even though GPS data had been used to site (and vet) the control location and was double-checked against the georeferenced map. Analysis after the fact suggests that the error bars on the siting were sufficiently large as to account for the differences. Perhaps full tracking logs would have been better - we were using only single points - but the point is that even best practices are imperfect. In our case dense evergreen cover and high mountains nearby contributed to the large error bars. In the absence of more data about the problems at CNYO, it's tough to know what lessons should be learned.

Yes, I would say full tracking is much, much better than just going out to a set of coordinates. If it's done over twice, I'd say you shouldn't have room for complaints even in upstate evergreens.

Several years after the use of maps and vetting tape became widespread...

Maps and vetting tape are subject to interpretation and success in their use depends on skill. GPS, far less so.

It does seem to me that Rogaines and GPS are a match made in heaven.

As to j-man's point, GPS devices are wonderful as a backup against parallel error in the setting part of things. At some point with the ubiquity of GPS in cell phones, there is much more of a potential problem with cheating in rogaines, since at the slower pace of a rogaine, with much longer travel between most control points, it would make longer straight-line legs through bland terrain much less risky if there is easy relocation near the end of a leg. So to the extent to which cheaters exist, GPS may be a little less heaven sent. Tundra/Desert has made this point quite thoroughly on other threads, and though he is a little more of pessimist than I, it is still a worry for rogaining.

When official results will be posted?

The Western Australian Rogaining Association (WARA) has been using GPS devices as an integral part of setting events for a few years now. WARA has drafted a policy document for the use of GPS devices in setting rogaines which I believe is just about ready to make public. In fact I half expected to see it on the website. I'm sure I could forward a draft copy to anyone interested.
This is all in line with the recent changes to the rules of Rogaining as published on the Australian Rogaining Association website Rules of Rogaining. In particular R7(b) which allows GPS devices to be carried provided they are in a container that does not allow the information to be accessed whilst on the course. In the case of WARA, we provide opaque tamper evident bags to carry the GPS device in.

I shall upload the results later today.

Robert Buraczynski

We took into account the 4 questionable controls. It looks like it will not change the overall results. Thanks for supporting out annual Rogaine.

Yes it will change the results. It determines the winner of the trifecta. A control should be considered questionable only when many or most teams identify it as such. The top four teams all found #70 without incident, and GPS tracks show it in the right place.

I've loved this series, but will have to think long and hard before considering whether I do it again.

Well, Frank, my GPS track certainly shows #70 at the end of the wrong marsh, and we spent about 40 minutes looking around the less-well-defined marsh on whose tip the circle was located, finally just decided to check out the other marsh on the way back out. Besides the GPS track from the datalogger, pace count from the rather nearby track bend is off by a factor of two or so. Perhaps if we had followed our original route plan to attack from the west end of that first marsh, rather than noticing it was pretty dry and just cutting across its middle to the little hill just south of the circle as an attack point, we too would have found the control a bit early and convinced ourselves that we had mis-estimated our distance, or just not noticed the first little marsh. I'll try to figure out how to take a screen shot of our tracks in that part of the Google satellite view of the area and e-mail it to you. Haven't yet used Quickroute to superimpose the track on the O-map (fell asleep and had a car accident on the way home, and as a consequence have done less post-race analysis than I would normally do), but it is easy to pick out the O-map features from the aerial photo.

Speaking of top four teams, there is nice Greg's GPS log:
http://www.bears-on-speed.info/doma/show_map.php?u...

Frank, at least in the posted results, the organizers did not credit us with #70 even though we probably spent 30-40 minutes looking and came up empty - so it shouldn't affect the trifecta. Like Eric, we came in across the middle of the dry open marsh, and attacked from the small hill - also confirmed by pace counting. In retrospect we probably should have gone back and hunted at the end of the first marsh 'just in case', but since it was mid morning Sunday, we elected not to waste any further time and moved on (having wasted much time on the two controls in the northeast on Saturday that weren't in the circle - we just figured it was another case of the same. No GPS tracks as Pavel's tracker went missing during the event.

That first marsh also extended a bit further west than mapped (if you look at the area in Google maps), which explains why our direct route from the road bend went right through the middle of it to the small hill - which would put the flag right at the blip in Greg's track where they crossed the small stream. Not even close to the circle...

Clint, while the results don't list 70 as one of your controls, the point total does include it. (I noticed because it moved us down to 6th overall.) Though it does look like you may still be short points - you mentioned visiting 48 in your log, but it is neither listed in the results nor included in the point total.

OK, better orienteers than me have convinced me that 70 was also incorrect. I suppose we were lucky to find it in the first place, and then my interpretation of my track was wrong.

The fact remains that teams were credited with anywhere from 0 points (my team) to 264 points for controls not found.

Some stubborn teams lost many hours on the bad controls, some pragmatic teams lost only moderate time by looking for similar nearby features (my team - credit my teammate Gary M. for most of the pragmatism), and some impatient and/or prescient teams lost almost no time. So the whole thing is too much of a mess to derive any kind of satisfactory result.

I agree that it is better to not have misplaced controls, but I don't think the resolution employed is unreasonable. And I enjoyed the event, in spite of losing significant time on one misplaced control and less time on another. (We actually benefited a little on a third since it was closer to the road than expected.) The significant time loss was partially our fault, for not giving up/relocating off something more certain earlier. (It also would have helped to have the control feature - a wall - on the map.)

I think it is also worth pointing out that CNYO's events are put on by a very small number of people and I know that some years land-use permission comes very late (through no fault of theirs), necessitating a rush. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try for perfection, but I'm much more willing to forgive problems that do arise - and I'd much rather have events with a chance of misplaced controls than no events at all because they don't have the people to triple-check every point.

So, thanks to Pete, Shawn, and the others involved this year! I plan to be back.

You needn't triple-check, single check usually works even if you're out of time. Just put the flag on a more or less identifiable feature and hit the button in your Garmin/Qstarz. Move the circle in OCAD after you get home, and try to describe the location as fairly as possible to your competitors.

The final decision was indeed the correct one, based on International Rules of Rogaining B29a:

If a checkpoint is misplaced, teams who recorded a visit to the misplaced checkpoint will receive the points for that control and teams who can satisfy the organizers that they visited the correct site will also receive the points for that control.

I'm not sure if this is the best rule, but it's the rule.

So congratulations, Pavel.

I guess corrected results will be posted soon.
Also, please add Lilia Lavrov and Dilia Bolster to 6 hrs race. They were missing first time.

Pavel, congrat!!!

Thanks Frank! The funny part is until Stina pointed out both Clinton and me completely missed the fact that we were not accounted for CP 48. If we caught it in time, all the scoring questions about #70 wouldn't matter that much.

You needn't triple-check, single check usually works even if you're out of time. Just put the flag on a more or less identifiable feature and hit the button in your Garmin/Qstarz. Move the circle in OCAD after you get home, and try to describe the location as fairly as possible to your competitors.

I have a hard time believing this is best solution, as I've seen enough GPS routes that are totally bogus (on out-and-back routes, where one would think the tracks would be the same). It may be a somewhat useful part of a solution, but no more.

My sense is that one thing missing is a willingness to discard a possible control site that you have planned on using, if, when doing field-checking, the site is no good -- for example, too little correlation between map and terrain (and no time to fix the map), or lots of thick vegetation. You need to be willing to say No, and go find someplace else, someplace better. Or just chuck the control completely.

Every control site should be clear and distinct and obvious. There is no reason to use features that are just "more or less identifiable." Your competitors will thank you, and you will enjoy the post-mortem (and the results compilation process) much more.

My other suggestion is that time planning (for the course setter) is a much under-appreciated skill. If you are finishing things up at the last moment, that is not good even if you get away with it this time. Figure out how many hours, or days, or weekends, or whatever, you will need to field check all the points, plus another 25% (at least) for finding replacement points for the ones you reject, plus another 25% because there will be snow, or terrible heat and bugs, or heavy rain. And then start the process early enough. If you are staying up most of the night(s) before the event, your time planning skills need some work. And you will be burned.

Now, I've never been course setter for a rogaine. But the above certainly applies in O', and I would think it would be so for rogaines too. And I don't get the sense it is being done.

Having set three rogaines in Allegany State Park (with varying levels of final responsibility), I agree with PG about time planning.

The one thing that I would add is that last minute vegetation growth can change things no matter how well you plan. One year we were surprised to find that a fairly obvious stream junction site had been obscured by an acre or so of thigh-high stinging nettles (that hadn't been there three weeks earlier!). Solution was to "hang 'em high" and warn competitors. It was still on the stream junction, but you had to be within two meters to know it!

Obviously what PG suggests is better than what I suggest, and also requires more time. My point is that if at least what I suggest had been done, there would have been more/happier customers than in this particular case.

Sure, there are lots of things that could have been done that would have caught the mistakes - they are all good ideas and should be employed when possible. But what about when those things aren't feasible? (e.g. even GPS requires some skills to get the track overlaid on the map) After all, most controls are going to be fine even if your only strategy is to have a reasonably experienced orienteer hang the flags. My point is that I'd rather have the event (assuming a reasonable likelihood of things being correct) than a requirement (real or perceived) that one has to use GPS, have multiple checks, etc.

Of course, major events (such as championships) are a different story.

Additionally, if everyone did what PG suggests, then mappers wouldn't feel the need to straight-jacket course planners and competitors by limiting their depiction of the terrain to only those features they feel deserve a control site.

Well, if basic skills, such as map handling with some GPS-compatible software, aren't in supply among the organizers, then perhaps potential attendees should be notified about that so that they can plan their attendance accordingly?

I am suggesting a reasonable (to me) compromise to future organizers who are pressed for time that is guaranteed to get the accuracy up, without expending much more of the precious time. It's a crutch, and a compromise, short of the proper way of doing things, but one that will get you most of the way to the proper outcome, which is better than none of the way. There has to be some basic level of quality, below which you aren't offering your attendees a fair deal even if you charge them zero; they still have to drive there and back and take a day off work.

The one thing that I would add is that last minute vegetation growth can change things no matter how well you plan. One year we were surprised to find that a fairly obvious stream junction site had been obscured by an acre or so of thigh-high stinging nettles (that hadn't been there three weeks earlier!). Solution was to "hang 'em high" and warn competitors. It was still on the stream junction, but you had to be within two meters to know it!

This sure seems like an example of a control site that should not have been used. And if the map had already been printed, just tell everyone when the maps are given out that #XX does not exist. Can't imagine doing so would ruin a course.

Or do rogainers like a little more adversity? Similar appeal to the mud races that draw lots of people?

And I'm curious about the process of course setting. Is there any field-checking prior to the course being finalized (meaning three visits to each control site, once to check, once to hang, once to retrieve, or preferably four visits, adding one to vet)? Or does the course get drawn up on paper and that's it, hang the controls as best one can? My guess is it's the latter, but I don't know what the standard practice is.

I would have thought the stream was not a point feature, so following it would make it easier to get within 2m of the junction.

If that is the control I recall, the actual stream was buried in vegetation, and in fact the location should not have been used. Finding such things is no fun and not necessary.

The policy we used was that each site was checked and double-checked by a different person in the eight months leading up to the meet. The third check was the bag hanging done (mostly) by a pair or folks on the day before. It was only on the third check that the vegetation was found even though the the second check had been 3-4 weeks prior.

@kadley/pg - if I had it to do over again, I'd probably cancel the control. We (course setters/meet directors/placement folks) did discuss it and felt that the cost of losing a questionable site, but easy-to-find (given the hanging) control upset the course design more than the attack at the control - we may have been wrong, but we tried. My point was simply that time management isn't always enough.

@ndobbs - it was a stream junction, so there were three viable stream attacks, but all three of them involved over 100m of stinging nettles so this wasn't quite as nice as it should have been.

An interesting feature of the stinging nettles in that particular rogaine is that they actually affected more than just one or two control locations from the standpoint of direct route choice, and they seemed to cause vastly more nuisance to some teams than others. I don't know if this was because of clothing choice, individual sensitivity to the toxins in the nettles, or presence of elephant tracks through the vegetation for teams coming into the controls later on. I know that our team in general found the nettles to be almost no problem during daylight hours, and not much more nuisance than ferns during night time, when they just made it a lot harder to see footing through down trees concealed by the dense vegetation. It was a little bit of a surprise to us when we got in to hear various teams discussing how they had skipped several controls later in the event when they saw they were going to have to wade through more nettles to get to them. I suspect a big part of things may have been wearing loose fitting, slightly thicker cloth long pants and jerseys, rather than lycra, but it may have just been less sensitivity to the nettles. Or maybe it all just paled in comparison to a few hours of backpacking one summer in our youth up in the Sierras through a cross-country loop of something called maybe Enchanted Gorge and Disappearing Creek, which I recall involved several miles of above head-height nettles with a rather more potent stinging agent! While I would generally prefer mostly open woods, it is often hard to predict what order teams will take controls in on a rogaine, and generally the density of vegetation isn't available information on the map. I don't like it when I feel we have spent the whole weekend either on trails or in logging slash, but it doesn't often happen, and in particular I did not come away from that BFLO/ROC event feeling that "Wow, those were nasty woods", but if anything an amazed sense of "How did we end up with 3000m of climb on our route here in the northeast?"