Friday, January 23, 2015

Jan 18, 2015 - A Fun Long Orienteering Course – Ngau Liu (牛寮)


Due to the organizer’s postponement of an orienteering event, I could participate in one more orienteering course before leaving Hong Kong. I knew that this course setter usually sets up high quality courses, so I was eager to try this course.


In the end, the course did not disappoint me.

The map for ME/MO course is shown below. I did not take many pictures on that day, since I focused on navigating through the course more. For the rest part, I would discuss my experience on some of the legs in this course.

In general, there were many cases where moving off-trail can be advantageous. Although it was difficult to run through the forest, walking through was totally reasonable. In control #1, I already used off-trail route and counted number of re-entrants to reach #1.

How do people go from #1 to #2? From what I have heard, these were some of the choices (maybe a combination of these):


I tended to choose routes that required careful navigation but were shorter, so I could save energy by doing less running. However, I got disoriented because of getting into the wrong trail. It told me a while to figure out where I was in the map.

After some longer legs, #5 through #10 were some shorter legs that required navigation through a mostly open area.

From #11 to #12, I did not know why I could not find a good trail and stuck in the thicket. It took me a while to get back to a clear trail.

Here is how some people might go from #14 to #15. It can be a combination of three routes, but I have heard of these general approaches.


I also like #15 to #16. I compared with another guy who used trail to get to #16. I found that my use of off-trail route did save time. The off-trail route had many features to help navigation: cross a spur, walk along the east edge of swamp, identify large rock and a stream and then cross a spur, climb the hill by following the rocky re-entrant.



In the end, there were another five short legs. I did find that a trail near #18 was not drawn.


Here is my result and my route. The course is quite challenging, but I found finishing within three hours achievable. I think I was the slowest person in ME.

Jan 10, 2015 - Jan 11, 2015 Orienteering in Shenzhen

To get a glance on orienteering in China, I got an opportunity to do two-day orienteering competitions in Shenzhen, China, which is right next to Hong Kong. Not being in Shenzhen for a while, it is also a chance to see how Shenzhen changed.

Day 1 - East Lake Park (東湖公園)


After crossing the Hong Kong border through Lo Wu, I got ~45-min ride to East Lake Park by bus. When looking around on the way to the park, it seems to me that Shenzhen is already very developed. I got a chance to walk around the streets. They looked generally safe and clean.


The start was at a plaza near the entrance of the park. The competition was named as “Guangzhou - Hong Kong – Shenzhen Cup” The competition acted as an exchange of orienteering between Hong Kong and Guangdong Province of China.

The following picture shows the start area. Like many competitions, the start uses 3-min boxes: competitors check in at 3 minutes before start. They advance one box for each minute, until they take the map and start. In China, they do not use start time, but use batch group. The batch group tells you relatively when to start. Instead of saying the official time, the officials will say “batch group #X goes into the first box”.


The sprint course for ME group looks like this:


With GPS watch data:


At the beginning, we passed through the finish, which was next to a Confucius statue. (Note: pictures were taken after the course)


Basically, the course had a lot of running (e.g., the first and the last legs). It was not difficult, since the bridges dominated route choice. The accuracy of the map and the control placement looked fine with me. One place that annoyed some of the runners was #2 to #3. One had to decide which way to cross the river. The better choice seemed to be turning right (go west) and using the small bridge. However, on that day, many people were fishing on the bridge. Some kids blocked the bridge to forbid runner to pass through. Therefore, most of us had to run around more.

Other memories include:

#8 to #9: I was a bit agitated to see a long run choice between running clockwise or counterclockwise. Still, I made a serious mistake by turning to a wrong path when using the counterclockwise route. Moreover, so kids around #9 really wanted to show me the location of the control. I would thank them even though their help was unnecessary.

#11 is the picture below. Just a control between Chinese-style tall rocks.


Otherwise, I did not have much to say about the course. I did not do many sprint courses, so I could not judge if the course could be made more challenging.

After the sprint, it was near evening. I was following the orienteering seniors to have fish hotpot. It was very nice!

The bonus after dinner was a night orienteering inside a school. The map looked like this:


There was also a panel that talked about the history of the competition and means to improve publicity of orienteering. I learned that the development of orienteering in China was greatly influenced by Hong Kong in the 1980s.

Day 2 – Fairy Lake Botanical Garden (仙湖植物園)



In the morning, there were some drops of rain. In the day before, I was lucky to find a group of people taking a taxi together to get to this place. This place usually had an entrance fee, but orienteers were exempted on that day, given that they arrived on time.

We walked about 30 minutes to get to the event center, which is shown in the picture below:


At the start, I could see a pagoda on the hill.


Today’s course was middle distance, which supposedly tested navigation skills. Here is the map for the ME course:


This course had more fun than yesterday. Control #1 was in a relatively confusing area, and control #3 required some thinking of the best route.

At control #5, I got into a very interesting area that I returned after the race. When I checked the electronic punch, why was the number incorrect? When I turned myself to the opposite side, aha, there was another control that was mine!


 

After the race, I realized that the WE group has the other control. However, these two controls were so close that I could take both in one picture. Isn’t that there is a control proximity rule, when controls cannot be too close to each other? I have a habit of checking the control number before punching, but I think the course should not contain two controls that are too close to each other to trick people.

The following picture was control #6. The person was removing the control after the competition. It was also located in an interesting area.


Then, this is a picture of control #7, at a pagoda in the middle of water:


I like the design of control #8 to #9. There were some decisions to make.

After that, there was a lot of physical exercises, in the form of going uphill, downhill, uphill again, and a long run on road.

Here is my GPS data on the map:


My results were below. I was number eight in both courses. I must like eight a lot.


After everyone finished the course, I walked back to several areas to check the map accuracy. Several people expressed that the map could be improved. When I walked back, I did agree with this comment. I will use an annotated excerpt of the map to discuss:

On my way to #7, I was lucky to find a path that led down to the water earlier. However, when I was in that competition, I did not see that path on the map. My hypothesis was that the purple line that shows the next control on the map covered the path.


Also concerning the route choice to #7, there was a trap that led runner down to some objects, but not totally to the road (see the map excerpt below). The object is the picture below:

 

However, to the north of this object, there is a path. In fact, I used that path from the road to get to this object. However, the map did not show the path.


This one is not about the inaccuracy of the map. I would even praise the resourcefulness of the organizer. Possibly, the organizer did not have enough control bags, so they used a cloth bag that has an orienteering symbol to act as a control bag. The location of this control is shown in the annotated map excerpt above.

 


I also heard that from #9 to #10, some people used the straight line route to climb the dark green area. It turned out that that area was not as dark green.

Besides walking back to check the accuracy of the map, I also went back to that interesting area. This area contained a lot of fossilized trees. These fossils had a lot of history, and I would like to learn a bit about these. I really like being a tourist after being an orienteer.



Afterthoughts

I think these two races were still decent. There were no obvious control placement errors. Some controls led to interesting places. A few legs needed some thinking. The sprint could be made with more thinking and less pure running. The middle distance map can be more updated.

What I did not know was that on the same two days, there was another orienteering competition in Shenzhen that was less publicized in Hong Kong. There was also a sprint on one day and a middle-distance on another day. Both of the courses looked more technical than the competitions that I participated. There were more white woods and more intricate contours. I wish I could have joined the other competition!

Sprint:

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Jan 1, 2015 High Island, Sai Kung (西貢萬宜) in Hong Kong -- 135-Control Orienteering

I was excited to participate in an orienteering course that has the most number of controls that I have ever done. Therefore, before going to Sai Kung, I got a lot of carbohydrates by going to "drink tea".


It took me two hours to get to the event center. It was first a MTR subway ride, then a bus trip, and then finally a chartered minibus trip to High Island, where the Aquatic Center is located. I remembered that when I was at secondary school, I was there once because of a class picnic. Then, I had not been there until today.


This is my number tag and punch card. According to HKOC, this is the new ChinaHealth e-punch system.



I was assigned to start at an earlier time. It was great that my tag number was related to my start time. I did start at the :35. The first start is at the :30. Here are the pictures at the start area.



Here is the map for MO (Men Open) group.


As expected, controls were everywhere. It was very easy to find the wrong control, so checking the control number was essential! I tried to memorize control numbers of the next three, but the distances between controls were so short. Very quickly, I needed to memorize another three. Besides, it was difficult to check the correct control number in the middle of the course. Missing reading a control number may result in DNF due to mispunches.


Most controls were either near the runnable forest, or open land with scattered distinct trees.




After finishing, I had to download the results. Did I punch all controls? I did! The result was valid!


Here is the ramen-like result sheet. Someone forgot to punch one point at #8X, so he re-punched #8X and thereafter. This results in the longest result sheet (probably one half longer than me).


After the race, food and drink were ready for us. Besides banana, there is also hot drinks (Ovaltine!)


As a bonus, there are some other activities in the afternoon. The first one is a control maze. Each person was given a map with five controls. Participants needed to punch all five on the map. Besides, each control had a number. Participants needed to sum up all five numbers and report it at the finish line. Only correct sum and punches would make the result valid.



The second one, sack race. Probably everyone knows what it is. In both races, the MO group had a heat first. Those who passed the heat got to the final.


In the end, there was a prize ceremony. The best three in each of the orienteering race, the control maze, and the sack race would get a prize. There was also a best three overall prize after summing the results of all three races. I only got the fourth place in orienteering, and did not get past the heat in the next two places. Therefore, I almost could get a prize!



In summary, this orienteering event had a good gimmick. Having that many controls in a flat and runnable forest was fun, in a sense that sudden change in direction of running is needed to finish the course efficiently.