April 9, 2000
Linne Woods
Carl Larsson, Meet Director
So, we are in full swing again with a new orienteering season. When I was driving home from the airport around midnight on the Friday night before the meet in a pretty intense snow-storm (after being delayed for about six hours due to weather) I was not really looking forward to putting out the flags the following morning.
I was pleasantly surprised when I woke up on Saturday morning. There was probably 2–3 inches of snow but it was a nice sunny day. It was amazing to see how fast the snow was melting. When I started around 11 a.m., everything was nicely snow-covered (there was even ski-tracks in the woods!) but when I was done in the afternoon, most of the ground was clear.
With the weather in mind, I did not anticipate a huge turnout, but it was time for another surprise—people probably just felt it was time for their first spring run. As a final count we had more than 250 people enjoying a pleasant Sunday in the woods!
As a "First ever event in Chicago land" we had the pleasure of offering a "Score and Grab Orienteering." The way we had it structured was a one hour score-orienteering and after the hour was up, each runner had half an hour to get back to the start point and collect as many bags as possible.
After a very hectic few minutes at the finish when the 1.5 hour came to end, it was quite clear that Jeff Schefermayer have had an outstanding race and was able to collect 550 points with Charlie Shahbazian as a close second with 530 points. Interesting to note was that Charlie only had one bag collected during his "grab-part" and Jeff was able to get three bags.
I think everybody enjoyed the "score and grab" concept (it is a really easy way of collecting the bags!) and luckily we did not have any major incidents during the map-copying (22 runners "sharing" eight master maps at the same time worked out fairly good). What I learned is that we need to have to advertise the mass start better to increase the amount of runners that are pre-registered.
On the white, yellow and orange courses we offered the classic course setup and we had several runners with really impressive times. The most impressive was probably our new import, Peter Pach, who ran the orange course (4,270 meters) at the very good time of 36:55 (less than 9 minutes/km!). Also the winners on White (Philip and Jenny Whitley) and Yellow (Grant Legonvarn) were moving fast out in the woods with times around 11 minutes/km.
Finally, I want to thank everyone helping out during the meet. Beginners clinic was conducted by Jeff and Jim, registration handled perfectly by Marie, Emma and Clark, start/finish by David and Katy and control pick-up by most of the runners on green and red course, Jeff and Pete. Again, thanks for all your help—I guess it is time for me to come up with a new "fun-O" for next year.
