I have long felt that the Needham Town Forest is a terrific venue for the sprint format because of its trail loops, clean and mostly runnable woods, and an abundance of mapped point features such as cliffs, boulders, and findable reentrants. When I was talking with Jeff Saeger about what other courses to add to a spring sprint, he thought and then suggested, "Why not another sprint?"

So the Sprint became a Doubleheader, which means that the competitive folk could count on virtually doubling their national ranking points in this popular series of events, and anyone else could try their luck for fun. [Sprint ranking points have been assigned only to runners finishing their course in under one hour.]

And I added a White to accommodate our youngest competitors and complete beginners and family groups, all of whom showed up. To explain the basic concept, I retailed Sprint 1 as being essentially long Yellow and Sprint 2 as a short Orange, which led to some confusion because neither sprint looked much like a conventional color-coded course. Sprint 1 made extensive use of Needham¹s trail loops and offered far more route choice than any Yellow course. Sprint 2 had many more controls in a shorter distance, and involved numerous short legs with frequent direction changes, culminating in the ODeath Spiral¹ of controls #11-#16 which required a secure knowledge of where you were and where you intended to end up.

Every O-meet is a collaborative event. Jeff Saeger made the maps, Joanne Sankus provided administrative and publicity support, Jeff Schapiro brought equipment, set O-signs, and worked Finish. Pelle Wahlstrom and his wife supervised registration setup, and newcomers Annemarie Rom-Weisenbach and Susan Silverman worked the desk. In addition, Susan volunteered as staff photographer for the day. As the event went on, Judy Karpinski, Jon Campbell, Jim Paschetto, Doug Martin, and Andy Hall all willingly and in some cases completely unbidden stepped in to provide needed support. I am grateful to all of the above persons, as should be all participant of the event.

Any weaknesses in the day¹s program were of my own contrivance. I nearly ran out of Sprint 2 maps, and I was made aware that the placement of control #6 on Sprint 1 was made problematic by the presence of a similar terrain feature visible while en route but actually in a out-of-bounds area. Otherwise, it was a splendid day to be in the woods.