The Tucson orienteering club put on a series of events which just happened to happen right before we were going to fly out from Phoenix. We got to participate in 5 out of 9 of the races, and while we would have loved to do all of them, at least we had time for some.
Breakfast (and Bev charging) stop on the way down to Tucson:
I was too focused on navigating and running to carry a camera around. John provided all the photos for this post.
So you can blame him for this picture of the desert flora:
The first day at Catalina State Park was a full-on reminder that technical orienteering can sometimes be challenging. After a couple quick and easy controls, I hit a series of nav legs that gave me one kind of trouble after another.
Eventually I arrived at the finish, where John was waiting to capture a little clip of my performance assessment:
The next day we drove south to some open grassland where there was a mass start event, with interesting twists. In one section, we had a set of controls to the north and a set to the south, and we had the choice of which bunch to do first. There was a portion of the map blanked out so you had to figure out how to navigate to one control without all the topo information. And the final few controls were along a line but without the control location specifically indicated (so you had to follow the line to find them). Super fun, always enjoy something different and interesting.
Gathering at the start to get our briefing:
A view of the somewhat-snowy mountains in the background:
I had a lot of fun with this one, attempting to follow the faster runners when possible. People would converge on the controls, you had to make sure it was the right one for your course (short, medium, or long), and then there were runners going in all directions for the north/south sets.
There was occasionally some sharp vegetation, catclaw being the worst. I really should have worked harder to avoid that. This might be catclaw in John's photo of a control:
And some nice runnable sections through the grass:
It's neat going to larger events and seeing a bunch of runners' tracks on LiveLox (you can speed up the replay on the top menu bar):
Driving back into town, trying to get a view of the old planes in the "graveyard":
Day 3 was a handicapped race, based on gender and age. The young'uns had to find 7 out of 7 controls in a "box" (a set that you can find in any order), and other categories had to find 6 or fewer. Once you finished the box controls, the last ~4-5 controls were the same for everyone. I like to run blue (the longest) courses when given the choice, but I was all in on competing head-to-head with handicapping. Super fun to get through the box quicker than the pros and then try to hang on as they fly past.
The next day was a training day in a flat area full of tiny washes, lots of saguaros, and precise navigation. Really good for practicing careful navigation.
The final event that we could attend was a 3-hour Score-O, one of my favorites. It's harder to follow along on LiveLox because we could get the points in any order, but here's the link if you're interested:
Again I didn't carry a camera and was only focused on running and nav, although that didn't keep me from messing up a section of trail navigation at the end. John took just one picture this time:
Plus another at the finish line:
Thanks for the pictures, John!
We had a great time running in the desert and really enjoyed exploring Tucson. I suspect we will be back there sometime!
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