A Little Sunday Morning Fun

 

As most of you know, here in Vancouver we do a fair bit of sprint training. Once a week we have our trainings on a different city park map at a one to four, five or seven point five thousand scale, however in GVOC we also have a series called 'Why Just Run?' Once a month we put on a bigger, electronically timed, race on one of our "forest maps". Here's the map from this week.

 

Okay so it's a sprint map. But it is actually one of my favorite sprint maps I've ever run on. The reason I love this map is simple - it gets me every time. I'm starting to get the hang of it now that I've run there a couple times but I still can't make sense of parts of it unless I'm standing completely still. I certainly do not have it memorized as well as some areas that I've only ever run in once.This section:

The main area of the SFU Campus is actually made of three different levels - all mapped onto one flat piece of paper. It is mapped well and when you study it now it makes perfect sense how one area is below the other because of that small staircase over there. And how that area must be the middle level because it has grey over it and the tunnel symbol under it. Unfortunately however as the rule in orienteering generally goes, the faster you move the harder it gets. As soon as your sprinting around it becomes a whole different story.

I've always found the biggest challenge in sprint maps is multi-level areas. I'd love to see how the pro's work through knowing what goes where. Have a look at the map, see if you can figure out what up and whats down. Anyways, I just thought it'd be fun to share a favorite map of mine! And don't forget there's plenty more where that came from... I hear the Vancouver Sprint Camp is a good event :p. Results and other courses from this mornings race are on the GVOC page at http://gvoc.whyjustrun.ca/events/view/754