5/24/2017 World Orienteering Day - photo questions, running after rain

On last Wednesday, it was the World Orienteering Day (WOD). Different countries organized different orienteering events on this weekday.

It was brutal for the organizers in Hong Kong. In the morning, the Hong Kong Observatory put the first Black Storm Warning of this year. Rain was heavy at many places in Hong Kong. When I left home in Sheung Wan, I spotted a few checkpoints labelled MetOC. With the rain, I wondered if anyone would bother reading the checkpoint information on the street.

Photo Hunt

There was one WOD event that did not require to go outdoors. There was a photo trail-O event on WOD, asking participants to identify the correct checkpoint flag in 25 pictures. The following link shows the photos, the maps, and the solutions.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B68fxJcatQoBdDNpcEFDN0NwZnc/view

I played it when I was communing in subway (MTR) to the office in the heavy rain, and completed it during the lunch time. There were a few questions that I hoped I could find an alternative way to verify my answers, which told me some time.

I was happy that in the end, I got them all correctly.

Sprint-O in Victoria Park

The sprint-O happened after rain. Fortunately, I did not need to work OT in the office on that day, so I had time to change my clothes in the office for this event. The photo below was the event center:

The next picture was the start:

The next picture was the finish:

The following was the map of the event (for M21):

Here is my sport camera video:

In general, I was not satisfied with the result. This course could sometimes be tricky. Perhaps I was tired after work, I made many wrong decisions (#4, #6, #9-11, #17). especially #9, where I ran out of the map.

In the end, however, I got a third place. I started to see the pattern that while map reading and navigation skills are important for sprint-O, running speed is more important. I hope that I made less big mistakes in the future.

5/21/2017 Sprint-O at Fung Shue Wo, Tsing Yi, HK

The day after the wedding, there was a orienteering ranking event for sprint. Ranking events not only decide the annual overall ranking of the competitors, but for M21/ W21 competitors, they also decide whether the competitors can enter the elite group (ME/ WE).

This ranking event occurred in Tsing Yi. The event center was at a school. The following video shows the surrounding of the event center. It showed the official time, the result processing station, the real-time result display, and the number bib station.

Yesterday's VIP, 40,000, was also in the race, despite the wedding ceremony:

The start was outside a park. Each lane was for different competitive group.

The map for M21 is as follows (see the enlargeable map here):

Before the race, I did not check who was 1 minute before me. When I checked the video, I realized that he was one of my orienteering mentors: Ricky Law. In fact, I followed him most of the time, but I did not realize it. Thus, I will refer to the annotated map and the YouTube video often.

The annotated map (enlargeable map here) shows my route in orange, but I also show alternative routes in purple and red.

The YouTube video is my sport camera record.

To #1, I suddenly stopped in the middle of the road because I thought the road was not legal to cross (red vertical lines mean forbidden areas). Upon more careful reading, the red lines did not appear on the road, so I proceeded.

To #2, I did not know whether I broke the rule. When I saw my checkpoint, there was a small wall that was easy to step up, and it was mapped. I expected the wall in the map should be gray in color. However, it was black. In International Standard of Sprint Orienteering Maps (ISSOM) 2007. Black walls are not legal to pass, while gray walls are okay to pass. In this case, I would rather map it as a gray wall, but I did not know it was the mapper's intention. If the mapper thought this 50-cm-tall wall is impassable, then I broke the rule.

To #3, I still thought that the northern route was faster. Anyone ran the southern route (in purple)? Moreover, in the north, I should use the red route to shorten the running length.

This was the point that I met Law Sir. Here, it is nice to see that we used different route to #4. Law Sir used the purple route (I guess), while I used the orange route. However, I made a 1-min big mistake when approaching the checkpoint. In the end, he was ~10 seconds faster than me. Without the mistake, however, I think my route was better.

When going to #5, I think I saw Gilbert taking picture of me. When approaching #5, I saw Law Sir leaving #5.

Seeing that the drainage was dry, that route to #6 should have an absolute advantage. Thus, there were just a lot of running going to a different area of the map.

#8 I did not know why I took the orange route. Taking the purple probably needed less thinking, and slightly faster.

#10 is somewhat tricky because it was intentionally a dog leg (same route when going in and out) when coming in and out of the checkpoint. This was the point that I caught up with Law Sir. Then, I felt that I followed him most of the time at #11 - #14. I tried to run a different route if possible, but sometimes following was the best option. After #14, I ran ahead of Law Sir and I was on my own.

To #15, I think I broke the rule by crossing the yellowish-green area (permanently out of bounds). Sometimes I was not sure how these permanently forbidden areas were mapped. Common sense should tell me not to walk into hedges and flower beds. However, when someone mapped the grassy areas as yellowish-green, I might absentmindedly enter an area that I should not step in. Part of the reasons was that I simplified the map for this leg.

To #16, I made another mistake by running too far out. I think I was tired and not memorizing my personal reminder properly. I told myself to run two more blocks after a small park-ish area. Then, turn left and keep running to another park-ish area to find the checkpoint. However, I did not memorize that the park-ish area was on the left, not on the right. Thus, I made probably another 30 sec mistakes here.

Finally, I got to the finish:

At the finish, I thought the first place could finish at 17:xx. However, I was surprised that first place was only <1 min faster than me. What happened to them?

Thus, while I was at top 5 of my group, I felt lucky that my two substantial mistakes did not affect my ranking too much.

The Wedding for an orienteering couple (2017-5-20)

This year in March, I briefly mentioned an engaged couple participated in MSF Orienteering in Lamma Island. It turned out I had heard both of the names, since both had some publicity in orienteering. The groom, nicknamed "40,000", had discussed with me on orienteering matter when I was still in the US. The bride, Julie, was not introduced to me yet, but I thought I had seen some orienteering blogs written by her some years ago. Since the orienteering community looks like a big family, I got a FB invite about their wedding ceremony.

The wedding was in 5/20/2017 (Sat). To Chinese, this is a lucky date because 520 sounds similar to "I love you" in Mandarin Chinese. The wedding was organized in a Chinese restaurant, which I think is a common way that Hong Kongers organize wedding. During the reception, there were places for taking pictures, signing names, accepting gifts for the couple, and having marjong tables. What was unique was that since both were orienteers, someone also promoted orienteering by laying out electronic checkpoint punches on tables, and allowing everyone to use a map to punch these checkpoints in a certain order, as fast as possible.

After finishing the tabletop orienteering game, each person could get a card, with one side printing the wedding picture of a couple, and another side printing the map layout of the Chinese restaurant. Each person also got a result sheet showing the finish time and split time.

I also found that there were also several board games near the marjong table. Perhaps this is the younger generation style for the wedding reception?

The following video summarized the above:

Near 6 pm, more and more people came in. There seemed to be at least 3-4 tables reserving for the orienteering family, so I could recognize many faces in this wedding. Some people brought the maps from a city orienteering event on the same day. Another person brought maps from the World Master Orienteering Championship (WMOC) in New Zealand. There were also some people coming late because they had to prepare for the Sprint-O Ranking Event on the next day.

I did take the video for the entire wedding ceremony, but I decided not to put it here. The wedding ceremony is formal and legal, and I bet someone else has a better video. Thus, I decided not to put it on YouTube. To me, it was eye-opening, since I did not have a lot of wedding experience.

I thought I would only stay in the wedding ceremony, take a few group pictures, and leave. While I was invited in the FB event, I did not receive an official invitation for this wedding, so I felt that I should not stay for the dinner. However, a few orienteers did want me to stay. A couple of them even helped me to ask if there was room for one more dinner seat. Thus, I left the restaurant for a while to get the gift from the bank. In Hong Kong, it is acceptable to give gifts in a form of cash.

At the dinner, I was invited to sit with an experienced course setter/ mapper in Hong Kong. We had some great conversation while eating. During the dinner, we saw their young pictures and how they met. They had their sharing time, the moment of singing Karaoke, and the cheers to each table. I felt happy for them, and wished them good luck for the next stage of life. Group pictures were returned to each guest during the dinner, which seemed fast, since the pictures were taken about an hour ago. When guests were about to leave, the bride, the groom, and their maids and men formed a line to say goodbye to each one. After watching the video on what they did in the morning, they must be very tired at that moment.

Besides having 3 pictures with the couple, there were also souvenir from the orienteering in the restaurant. Thank you for your FB invitation. Congratulations and wish you both having better future!

Apr 29, 2017 Kowloon Park (九龍公園) in Hong Kong -- A Continuation on Trail Orienteering

This is my second time to write about trail orienteering (trail-O). For the basics of trail-O, please check my previous blog post. In a one-sentence summary, trail-O is a multiple-choice problem set that asks competitors which one of the multiple flags (or none) best describes a location on the map.

On April 29, 2017, there was a practice trail-O event in Kowloon Park (九龍公園). The purpose of the event was to promote trail-O, which is relatively new to Hong Kong in the history of orienteering. Although this was only my third time in doing trail-O, I like it a lot partly because trail-O focuses more on problem solving than physical running. To classify further, this trail-O is a precision trail orienteering (pre-O) event, meaning that most questions in this trail-O competition are not timed.

In this blog, I will cover all the controls in this competition. The emphasis will be on problem solving methods. A few technical terms will be defined as follows, since I will use them several times:

• Controls: checkpoints, or the center of red circles in the map. In trail-O, these controls are the ones that competitors need to identify out of several markers.
• Decision points (DPs): the location where competitors identify the designation of the marker choices (i.e. A, B, C, D). In this blog, the first picture for each control was taken at or close to the DP.
• Control descriptions (clue sheet): the 8-column boxes that describe the locations of controls, using IOF symbols. They will be translated in English below each clue in this post.
• Re-entrant (山窩): a large gully, or valley. A contour feature where elevation is concave in. The opposite of a re-entrant is a spur, which is convex out.

Here is the map for the trail-O event. All the answers will be at the end of this blog.

Control #1 and #2 -- Warm Up

Good to see the first 2 controls that could serve as a warm up for those who have not done trail-O before. In Control #1, there are two flags to choose:

Purple arrow: photo taking location and direction

Control #1: 2 flags, the south fence, east end

This control can be easily solved by reading the control description: it is the south fence. From the photo, one flag is on the north fence, and the other flag is on the south fence.

Purple arrow: photo taking location and direction

Control #2: 3 flags, thicket, NE corner (outside)

Control #2 is also easy. The corner of the thicket can be seen easily. To verify the answer, one may also count the number of trees to this thicket corner.

Control #3 and #4 -- Getting a Bit Challenging

The next two controls could be seen in the same DP. I separated flags A and B and flags C and D into two pictures, since A and B relate to Control #3, and C and D relate to Control #4.

Blue arrows: photo taking locations and directions

Control #3: 4 controls, re-entrant

Control #4: 4 controls, spur

Control #3 started to get difficult. This control tests the height judgement. The contour is the best hint. The key is to realize that the contour in the map extends to the opening of hedges next to the stairs. Thus, from the opening, if the flag can be seen horizontally, that flag is likely to be correct.

Control #4 was easier. It would be good to double check by walking down to the bottom of the stairs and seeing if the flag is next to the rock face. Then, return to the DP to answer the question. This brings to one of the most important points in this blog:

Control #5 -- Importance of Leaving the Decision Point (DP) to See in Different Angles

Do not stay at the DP to make all the decisions! The DP is only for identifying which flag is A and which flag is B. As long as the trails are not shown in the map to be forbidden to enter, competitors are allowed to walk anywhere on trails.

Blue arrow: photo taking location and direction

Control #5: 2 flags, trail, SW end

For Control #5, it is not as easy to see where the trail ends. However, it was allowed to walk to the other side to view the flags. See the picture and the map (with blue arrow) below:

From this angle, it is easy to see where the trail ends. Thus, answering this question can be done more confidently. When going back to the DP to answer the question, it is needed to remember which flag corresponds to which flag letter. In the above case, the two viewing angles were 180 degrees opposite to each other. Thus, when flags from left to right are ordered as A and B on one side, the order becomes B and A on the other side.

Control #6 -- Sighting Line Technique

There is only one flag for this control, so it is a true (A) or false (Z). The angle of the picture was chosen for readers to answer this question.

Blue arrow: photo taking location and direction

Control #6: 1 control, re-entrant

To decide whether the flag is at the correct location, the best way is probably using a sighting line: form a straight line between the distinct tree and the end of the fence (the blue arrow is larger for this reason). In the competition, you may use the straight lines marked on the compass to form this straight line. You should also see that the straight line is slightly off center of the red control circle to the north. Thus, if the flag is slightly on the left side of the sighting line from the viewing location, the flag is likely to be placed correctly (I got this question wrong because I did not know that the sighting line does not pass through the center).

There is still an issue: a smaller tree closer to the observer was not marked on the map. I actually wondered if this tree needs to be marked or not. This small tree seems to be quite distinct. With this tree marked on the map, the answer for this question would be pretty clear.

Control #7 -- Easy Control

Another true or false question. This one is pretty easy. It is easier to see the flag location if you get to the top. You may decide the answer of this question from this photo alone.

Control #7: 1 control, between two stone walls

Control #8, #9, #10 -- Hidden Features

The most challenging problems are this Controls #8, #9, and #10 cluster. Remember that it is important to leave the DP to get different perspectives?

Blue arrow is close to where the DP is

Control #8: 4 flags, the middle spur
Control #9: 4 flags, the west re-entrant, top
Control: #10: 4 flags, the NW man-made stone (cairn), east side

Let's look at Control #8 first. Merely standing at the DP will not help solving this cluster of problems. First, let's walk to a point tangential to the end of the stone wall (see below).

From the map, the spur is directly above the end of the stone wall. When walking closer to the stone wall, it would be easier to see if the flag is really placed like the map is described.

Then, we look at Control #10. It looks like Flag D is next to the man-made stone. However, there should be two stones, and the control should be the NW one (the inner one). To check the inner stone, one may walk to the location below:

Then, one can walk back to see which stone Flag D is at. It turns out that this cluster of controls does have "none of the above" (Z) answers.

Control #10 demonstrates the idea of "hidden features" -- control features that cannot be seen from the DP. In many cases, as long as one walks away from the DP, the hidden feature may become visible. Thus, answering these controls properly requires leaving the DP. 

Finally on Control #9. Would Flag A be the correct location? It turns out that Flag A is incorrect (I got this wrong, too). This is a more difficult "hidden feature" problem. The re-entrant (small gully) is further west from Flag A and cannot be seen from the DP.

There is still hope to see the control feature in this case, but one needs to walk quite far away from the DP. See the photo and the map (with blue arrow) below:

One needs to walk all the way back to Control #6 to view from the top. From this point, the re-entrant may be easier to see, by looking at the two possible spurs (on the picture one quarter to the right, and about half between top and bottom). Then, one can decide that the re-entrant does not have a flag.

Control #11 -- Long Range Control

This control demonstrates a control where one is required to view far away. The following photo was taken at the blue arrow on the map, and was zoomed in. The photo was not taken exactly at the DP because it was a bit difficult to capture the flag and the surrounding environment.

Control #11: 1 control, the north shelter, SE corner (outside)

This is not a difficult control, as long as one can find the good spot to see the two shelters. If one finds difficult to see them, walking closer to the control can be an option. However, one should not walk in the trails where red crosses and red lines are marked in map.

Timed Control

The timed control was originally supposed to be done between Controls #4 and #5. However, since 1) there was a long line, 2) there was only a time limit of 60 minutes, and 3) timed control is for demonstration only (not counted in the result), I was allowed to return to this to try for the timed control. In this timed control, there were 3 questions. The competitors needed to answer the questions correctly as fast as possible. In the real competition, the fastest person will win if there is a tie for the pre-O (given that all questions were answered correctly). Wrong answer will result a time penalty. There are no "none of the above" (Z) answers in timed control.

Below was the photo and the map (with 3 questions) for the timed control:

Blue arrow shows the viewing location and direction. Red circles are the questions. In the competition, the viewing direction is always pointing upwards.

I thought I could identify the trail bends quickly and correctly. In the end, however, I made one mistake for 3. Fortunately, this question was not counted in this event.

Post-event

When I returned and got the solution map, I found that I made so many mistakes (Controls #3, #6, #9, and 1 timed control). CH Ho, one of the most famous trail-O people in Hong Kong, discussed with me on some of my mistakes. I found that this discussion helped me to learn. Some of the strategies that I wrote above came from this discussion. In addition, Mr. Ho thought this event was quite challenging. For a seasoned trail-O competitor, this may be a fun event. However, I wondered if the first-timers can understand the expectation in this trail-O competition. Will they find this event, as a promotional event, too difficult?

Since this was a promotional event, I was allowed to return to the competition area to take photos of each control (hence the photos in this blog). On the way, I got a chance to talk to the course setter, including questioning about Control #3 (concerning contours). After this discussion, I learned the best way to solve this problem (as written above).

Below is the solution map for this trail-O event:

The course setter later asked in FB for the event evaluation. I think I agree from one of the comments that the course setter should try to organize a post-competition analysis tour to the finishers to explain the control solutions for each site, so that the new trail-O participants can learn some strategies in solving trail-O problems.

(P.S. I may later update this blog with more videos. If the videos are uploaded, I will announce it)