2021 Urban O Report

20 groups/teams of participants for this year’s event got lucky with a windless sunny 55-degree day. This was the first urban in this part of town and boy was it a doozy!

Remembering some feedback from last year we tried to create this year’s event to lend itself a little bit more to a “race” type setting. With 114 controls over two maps totaling 200 points people had a lot of options and some tough choices to make – cross to the north side and go for the ones worth more points (46 controls/110 points) or stay south and get more controls worth fewer points (71 controls/90points).

Of course, more controls meant more room for error:

• 1 control was incorrectly marked on the map (#2)
• 1 control went missing (#7 – swear it was there when I checked on Thurs!)
• 1 control had the wrong “hint” but was marked correctly on the map (#9)
• 1 control you couldn’t see because the person had their garage door open (the audacity! - #17)

I’m still taking this as a win; however, I did give everyone 3 “free” points and some leniency on time since I know people were looking for things that were not there or incorrectly marked.

A breakdown of control visits:

• Control 1 was visited by everyone
• Controls 62 & 63 were next, visited by 17 of 19 people
• Controls 106, 107 & 108 were only visited by 2 people
• Control 9 had the most incorrect answers (wrong hint – right map) followed by #37
• 98 controls never had a wrong answer

This year’s results:

1 hour participants	Score
Spud, Johnny	26
Morgan, Jay	44
Morgan, Emily & Nikolai	44

 

2 hour participants	Score
Fragkias, Michail	34
P, Donna	37
Olnes, Andrew	40
S, John & Leslie	53
Thomas, Dustin	57
Russells & Naylor, Vaughn	117
Ford Family	147
Darla	Kept Sheet
Tsuda, Kim	Kept Sheet

 

3 hour participants	Score
Stewart, Jerry	48
Byrne Family	62
Lamont, Doug	83
Beberness, Steven	87
Ashley & Mikey	95
Wise, Janelle	112
Wright, Melanie	136
Velichko, Sergey	161
Morris, Frank	193

 

Listening to the stories as people came back it appears everyone enjoyed themselves, everyone agrees some people have some interesting things in their yard and lots of conversations on is it green or yellow?

We had two groups of newcomers and both made strong appearances. The Beberness group said they have talked about coming out to see us for a while and finally decided to show – they visited all 71 of the south controls! Ashley had wanted to come but not participate alone, luckily she found Mikey who was down for the adventure.  After a brief tutorial on using a compass they visited 68 total controls. 

As the Russell group was sitting at the finish and talking about a few quirks along the course they mentioned they covered 7+ miles in their adventure. That got my wheels turning and inquiring minds needed to know…how many miles was it if you were to visit all 114? Luckily, I had a volunteer to find out!

Frank needed to get some training miles and decided to run the course the next day just to see how much it covered. He followed the same rules as everyone else (he didn’t help course set) – he had 30 min to prep his route (I think he only used 10) and then started from the park and off he went! 2:57 later he approached the park with a score of 193 and 17.92 MILES! Obviously, this could flex depending on the routes taken but still…that was whole lot more ground covered than I expected it to be. He is scored in yellow above as his time/score isn’t official.

If you are interested to see his route – check out his Strava entry: https://www.strava.com/activities/6258405102.

 A few thank yous!

• As always a HUGE shoutout to John Murray. While he couldn’t make it due to an incident where his feet attempted to travel faster than the rest of him, he was still willing & able to pitch in and assist with getting the base map setup. Despite the many different versions I had, he provided his experienced advice and let me go my own way (for better or worse) was super helpful with reminding me how to work the mapping software.
• Thank you to Frank Morris for running the course just to get an idea of how far it was to cover all the controls. While I knew it covered some distance with all the little side streets, I never imaged it would be 17+ miles. Hope your legs are recovered!
• Thank you to Scott Cockerham in helping me plot/map and select control points and keeping me company at S/F. We spent many hours over many weeks but we had good weather so no complaints!
• Thank you to Harrison Wise for helping at the check in table prior to the start.
• Thank you to Melanie for volunteering to pick up controls – I know it was a rough one 😉

If you'd like copies of the maps and clue sheet let me know and I'd be more than happy to email them to you. I appreciate everyone’s feedback and took away a few things to do differently for next years event as I’ve already started to scout!

Hope to everyone again next month at the Fairmont event!