Troll Cup 2018

Did you know there are four towns bordering each other that all have Hampton in their name? Why is the US so uncreative with their city names? We may never know, but what we do know is that they have some stellar orienteering!

Last weekend was the Troll Cup at Mt. Tom located between, North, South, East, and Westhampton Massachusetts. The event served not only as the Troll Cup, but also doubled as the US Junior National Champs. So there was a large turnout of high school students from across the country. Interestingly there were a couple schools from Florida, Georgia, and Texas, all places I didn’t even know they had orienteering.

Who comes up with these names?

The terrain was typical of New England. Open, hilly forests scattered with cliffs and rocks, one of my favourite types of terrain.

Day 1 - Robbie

The event was a two-day classic with a chase start on Sunday. Combined with the fact that this was my first meet of the season, I was just aiming for a clean race on day one. That wasn't so hard because the navigation was pretty easy, most legs were on bare hillsides, and to the disappointment of my legs, many going straight up.

Nothing like 125m of climb on one leg to wake you up in the morning

The whole course went very smoothly and I managed to finish in second place about 3 minutes behind Jordan Laughlin so I had someone to chase on Sunday.

Day 2 - Graeme

We returned to Mt. Tom but this time we weren’t greeted by a bright sun but clouds and drizzle. Never the less there was a race to run so time to warm up.

Day 2 was much more technical

The course day was more around the top of the mountain (but still didn’t disappoint with lots climb) and ramped up the re-entrants and cliffs. As well mixed up the start with your start time being determined by your day 1 start – I didn’t have a great first race so was pretty far down the order.

The terrain was quite enjoyable. It was dominated with large spurs and re-entrants that you could use for macro orienteering, along with lots of intricate streams, cliffs and boulders that you had to use around the control. Finally, spring just starting to start so the forest was quite runnable as there was little to none underbrush. Overall had a decent race with a few errors on my direction and route choice.

For a more detailed look at the courses you can check out the RouteGadget for Day 1 and Day 2.