Hard Orienteering: W.H.O.S. in?
Orienteering, by definition, is trying to get from point to point in unfamiliar terrain as quickly as possible. Originating from military land-navigation training in the late 19th century, you can race orienteering on, or in, anything!
On a horse.
On foot.
On a goat if that floats your boat. And if you Google it, apparently, it does for a select few.
Where am I going with this and why?
One of the toughest things about the sport we do, be it enduro or hard enduro, is track set up and layout. What goes into making a race is mind bending.
As a point of reference let's consider the W.A. Hard Enduro Series.
Planning for a WHES event starts weeks in advance. Track selection happens one or two weeks prior to the race and marking out runs over the entire weekend of the week prior. The set up is beyond taxing and the only reason it gets done and we have five competitive rounds is because the people that are doing it are freaks of nature that never seem to need to sleep!!!
Enduro is no different. I was reading, just recently on Facebook that the the T&E Club was struggling to get its track fully marked in time for the Grimwade 2-Day - one of the premier events on the calendar. "Volunteers and officials are becoming very sparse and hard to get. Always seems to be the same people so it becomes very tiring very quickly."
The busier we get, and the higher the cost of living gets, the less that people can afford to give up their time to set riders up for the quality racing we have come to expect.
But, when the temp drops and the dust is suppressed by the rain, riders want to race anywhere and any way they can - not ifs, ands or....... buts!
How good would it be then if you could have an event or series of events where you did not need to actually make a track?
What if the track was, quite simply, just the entirety of the landscape within a well-defined boundary, such as a farm property, where no layout and no prep was needed?
It would be so much easier to plug new and novel events into our current combined racing calendars.
What if the direction of racing was irrelevant? What if whatever direction you needed to ride was the direction you rode? This would make track signage absolutely redundant.
What if the actual challenge was to get from Point A to Point B any way you can, as fast as you can, riding over whatever terrain you choose?
Then it would be the rider, not the track setter, that determines how far they push their own abilities.
How could it be done?
Quite simple.
1) You get a physical overview map to study before the flag drops. It shows the points on the landscape at a landscape scale, so you get the vibe - the lay of the land if you like.
2) Then you get a mapping layer to load into a basic tracking app like Avenza or Trackz or Gaia or GPS Tracks or whatever. If you don't have it on your phone because you are tech moron (like me) you just get it on a small Garmin GPS. Whatever. It's a moot point.
3) The points are loaded on the layer and they are marked in real space and time out on the property. I'm thinking flagging tape all over a tree and a big Point 1 stapled to the tree. (environmental side benefit - 10 rolls of flagging tape instead of the 200 the average WHES event uses)
4) The flag drops and you make your choice on how you are going to get where you need to go:
Charge straight up the vertical slope like Jarvis; or
Blast Mach 5 the long way around on fire trails like Daniel Sanders.
5) Once you get to Point 1, you snap a selfy. Then onto the next one and the next.
Imagine 20 riders finding the best/fastest way up the slopes of Roelands or Quindanning. Each rider taking ever so slightly different lines based on the choices they make in the heat of battle. No two lines would be the same and the outcomes of 'choice' will always be very different.
Moreover, riders can play to their own strengths and the strengths of the hardware they are riding.
True Hard Enduriacs may choose to go straight up (path of least distance), but a poor choice could see them hung up and loosing valuable gains. Single trail stalwarts would choose the path of least resistance, and they may just get there quicker because they are less likely to find grief.
Those that don't identify as either may find a compromise that compliments their own individual identity crisis.
Any way you cut it, no one rider is at an advantage.
Now, of course, the knockers and a naysayers will slam this and say "this is not new; this is just like Romaniacs". But it is not. Well, not really. The Ralleye style of Romaniacs covers track lengths of more than 100km per day. And many of the tracks are marked and signed.
Hard Orienteering could be considered 'like' Romaniacs, but really, it is Romaniacs in a petri dish.
Properties like Roelands are a bee's dick under 1km from corner to corner on their longest side. Going between two points, if you get it right, could take less than two minutes.
Can you imagine this concept?
On any given property an event would quite literally take a day to set up and an hour to pack down!!! It could be a series within a series, but with virtually zero energy invested relative to that which is currently invested into rounds we race now.
Most of the the hard work can be done on QGIS from the comfort of a home office for anyone that is half decent at making maps and sharing .gpx files.
What a concept!
W.H.O.S. in?
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