Friday, November 14, 2008

Urban orienteering

I joined some CSU orienteers for a workout last night that was really fun, and different than anything I'd done before. Urban orienteering! I bet there is a "real" name for this somewhere, but that pretty much describes it. The map is of Harvard university, which is pretty good for orienteering because it is so complex. Lori set up a 5km course, (thats straight-line distance), and I headed off into the darkness to see how quickly I could run it. The pinkish-brown is pavement, the dark gray objects are buildings, the hashed-pink area is construction, yellow is grass, green is people's yards (off limits), and white is open forest, generally that means grass with some trees. I had fun trying to pick the best line to get from point to point, it was certainly more like ski-o than foot-o, because you couldn't just take a compass bearing and run through the woods, you had to actually choose which paths and roads to follow because there were large brick buildings in the way of going straight.

2 comments:

Colin R said...

That looks pretty fun. Give me a shout if it happens again. Can I use my cross bike? :)

Alex said...

yeah you could, but you'd probably be going faster than your brain could keep up. Meaning you'd have to stop a lot to read the map. Since we don't have "official" meets, you can just print out this map and run (or bike) it any time you feel like it.

and wow fastest response to a post EVER. (forty-five seconds?)