Since first visiting the former Fort Devens last summer, I've wanted to hold a street orienteering meet there. With some 55 miles of mostly deserted streets and roads Devens is ideal. Then, this summer, a number of factors combined to encourage me to do it now rather than later. Devens is rapidly being developed and will soon have fewer empty streets and more traffic. It helped that Tom Keane and Kevin Donohoe of the Inline Club of Boston developed a working relationship with the Devens recreation department. The clincher was that I would be living temporarily at Devens and setting up an O-meet would be easy.
So, in early July, I declared a short-notice Street-O for the New England Orienteering Club and the Inline Club of Boston. Harriet Cohen posted it on NEOC's schedule, Sandy Tavilla added it to the ICB calendar and Jeanne Walsh notified Up North Orienteers.
It was remarkable that with such short notice 36 people came.
My intent was to challenge the NEOC and UNO orienteers to beat the ICB and visa versa. Since many ICB skaters have a background in maps from the club's so-called Advanced Tours, it seemed the competition could be fierce. It turned out that by one measure the orienteers won and by another the skaters won. That's probably best because next year can be a grudge match for both groups. More on team results below.
Mapping Devens starting from USGS topos seemed like it would be fairly easy since other than a new industrial park in the northeast corner, there's been little change to the area since the 1950s. But, during the weeks leading up to the meet, the pace of redevelopment and demolition picked up. Many of the older wooden buildings were torn down, a few roads were ripped out, and to top it off, a critical connecting road was dug up for sewer work. It seemed like buildings were coming down and roads disappearing faster than I could erase them.
The format was a modified score-o with 24 controls. All 24 formed the long course, any 16 was medium and any 7 was the short. Participants were welcome on skates, bikes, or on foot.
Many competitors deserve mention. Tom Keane (the overall winner), Noami Mackenzie, Sue Mix, Chris Mix, and Thomas Benner all skated 30 miles at a dawn TeamICB training session BEFORE coming to Devens for the street-o. Kevin Donohoe went out twice, nabbing first place in the team division on both the medium and long courses. NEOC's J-J Cote did the whole thing on foot, fording the Nashua River in one direction and swimming it in the other. Mark Rubin had a very long day, losing a punch card, coming back for another, and then punching 20 controls when he only needed 16 for the medium.
As to meet helpers, Katie Coney was registrar par excellence while also escorting countless people to the distant restroom. Kathy Wiberg of Devens Recreation was extremely helpful in determining acceptable locations for controls and wisely steered us away from high-security military areas and a 60-team soccer tournament. Shawn Grosser had no orienteering or skating background but not only patiently printed the various draft maps, he recruited three friends to compete.
For team results I used slightly modified track meet scoring with 5 points for first, 3 for second, 2 for third, and 1 for every finisher after that. Allowing for first, second, and third in the 18 possible categories (foot, bike, skate/individual, group/short, medium, and long), the orienteers won 30-27.
But, since the ICB would be likely to only skate while orienteers might skate, bike, or run, segmenting the categories by method (skate, bike, or run) gives an unfair advantage to the orienteers. Head-to-head, regardless of method, but still separating group versus individual results, ICB won 27-20.
Of course, we really could have weighed the team scores by the size of the groups, since getting a 5 person team around the course in a certain time would be harder than with 3 people. Still, there's only so much time in the day and after all that calculating, it would be hard to really say what those results would mean.
So we'll leave it this way: the orienteers had fun and the skaters had fun and both are asking when we can do it again.