Buena Vista – She’s running the wrong way.
“Come on, come on. She’s gonna get it. She’ll figure it out. Find the fence. Come on,” says Steve Willman, who created the map the young galloping girl is struggling to interpret.
Eventually the girl finds the fence and dashes into the pine and piñon. Occasionally she glances up from her map, but mostly her eyes are trained on the compass and laminated paper gripped in her hand.
Reading a map while darting through the woods is probably one of the most important skills for orienteers, who gathered en masse last weekend above the Arkansas River Valley and near Lake George for a five-day festival of maps, racing and camaraderie.
“The misconception I’ve seen is that people tend to think we are a bunch of Boy Scouts out for a leisurely hike,” says 48-year-old Steve Gregg, a longtime orienteering racer from Oakland, Calif. “But this is fast running. You can’t run full-out like in a road race. You have to back off your redline a bit to keep your mental game sharp enough to read the map.”
Described as running while playing chess, orienteering involves racing through all sorts of restrictive terrain in search of precise, and often concealed, stations – known as “controls” – that can only be found through reading a topographic map designed for the race. The timed racers punch holes in their racing cards at each flagged station before darting off to the next control.
Racers cannot look at their maps until their race starts. They use a compass and hieroglyphic symbols on their maps to find each control, which are usually placed near distinct geographical features like hilltops, valleys and large rocks. Often, the straight line between two controls is not the fastest path.
“That’s what makes it so addicting to me,” says Fedya Kleshchev, a 15-year-old from Eugene, Ore., who learned orienteering from his dad. “It’s never boring with clear paths and that stuff. You get to choose the path that you think is fastest.”
The Colorado Five-Day Orienteering Meet drew more than 200 racers from 11 countries and featured six races, including the U.S. Night Orienteering Championships and U.S. Relay Championships. The gaggle of brightly dressed racers ranged in age from 10 to 80-plus. The event was not unlike a very large family reunion.
“We’ve been doing this for 20 years and it is so fun to watch generations of racers growing up and competing. You watch top racers get old and you see their kids start to pass them up,” says Eileen Breseman, who with her husband Rick and three daughters rank as national champions in their relay racing division.
Orienteering competitions have Swedish roots and date to the late 19th century. Little has changed in the sport since then. Compass, map and navigation skills rank side by side with strength and running skills as essential tools in the orienteering world.
“Raw strength alone won’t cut it,” says Judy Opsahl, a 70-year-old racer from Los Alamos, N.M., who with her husband Dick – a 73-year-old ultra-running legend – has raced in orienteering competitions in six countries in the past 25 years. “It’s such a super sport. It can be frustrating at times, especially when you have no idea where you are. You are constantly challenged, no matter how good you are.”
For more information on orienteering, check out the U.S. Orienteering Federation at www.us.orienteering.org or the Rocky Mountain Orienteering Club at www.fortnet.org/RMOC/
Jason Blevins can be reached at 303-820-1374 or jblevins@denverpost.com.
