Rumsey was the first focused-ish orienteering training of the year after finals. I volunteered as a Course Planner in organizing Prairie Opener 2018. This is a great annual event in Alberta drawing lot of runners from Calgary and Edmonton.
Setting some of the last few up
Most of the day was spent with me walking, and setting out controls, I didn’t feel like running because there were a lot of them. I planned on running some of my own courses that I had planned later.
In bold red is the route shows the controls that I set out.
There might be a couple on the bottom cut off, but that is effectively the 7.6km that I set out. By the time I had finished I was fairly late and so I defaulted to doing a couple interval-like loops at high speed.
Above you can see 2 of the loops that I ran. I was fairly accustomed to the map at this point (after walking around on it for 2.5 hours) that I was able to do the courses without many mistakes. I was hoping to get onto some of the other parts further north that had sections that resembled the JWOC terrain in Hungary this year much more closely than the rolling hills, and impassible forest sections. Below are some portions that show this:
Although the countours here are more distinct (being 5m rather than 2.5m) the navigation through the vegetative portion mixed with the open was one of the best simulations of the 2018 JWOC terrain that I could make do with here in Alberta. Once I’m actually in Hungary, I’ll be able to comment on how different the terrain actually was from Rumsey.
Although the training wasn’t as much as I intended to have volume-wise, I did clock in about 11 km and 3 hours of map reading, which should count for something.
Michael Svoboda - Road to the Finish 