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Nobscot Scout Reservation, Sudbury, MA
April 15, 2018
Meet Director: Alex Vai

It was fantastic to see 70 starts at Nobscot to close out the second week of NEOC’s 2018 season, despite somewhat grim weather conditions. Even by New England standards, this mid-April day with temps hovering around 0C (32F), blustery winds, and persistent wintry mix (including one rather strong squall!) did not inspire confidence that warmer days are just around the corner! Notably, enough snow fell for a snowman to be constructed on the boulder by the Finish.

While the weather might have depressed the novice turnout somewhat, we still had a number of eager people here to try orienteering for the first time [and a rare appearance of NEOC's first president, Hans Bengtsson]. To you first-timers: Kudos! I hope the conditions added to the excitement of discovering orienteering. Certainly, it will make for even better storytelling in the weeks ahead. We hope to see you again soon!

We also had a number of impressive runs from more experienced orienteers and a good showing from the orienteering team at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.

There was some difficulty with the splits printer. It didn’t seem to like the cold either, and was somewhat randomly deciding whether to produce full printouts or partial splits. For those of you who like to endlessly analyze your runs…fear not! We verified that splits were downloading correctly and these are available online (see below).

I really appreciate the constructive feedback that I received about the courses from finishers. Apparently, people liked the fact that many of the courses ran counterclockwise on the map, that we had put some effort into hiding the advanced controls, and that we used of parts of the maps that hadn’t been visited in the past, especially the swampy area near the start.

At the prompting of a few competitors, I checked after the fact and found that there are in fact two depressions on the western side of the map (at and near Control 113), despite there only being one on the map. I will forward this feedback to the mapping chair to make things better for future events. And to anybody still whinging about the climb up the hillside…please do remember that hills are your friends and they will make you stronger! :)

I am tremendously grateful to the fantastic team of volunteers, including Jim Paschetto, Nick Townley, Mark O’Connell, Xevi Fradera, and Pete Lane. I am terribly sorry if I’ve missed anyone! If I have missed you, please get in touch so that I can thank you personally and also to help me put names to faces…I’m still working on that in NEOC. Overall, this was a great way to start my meet directing career, and if any of you all need help at a future event, you know how to get in touch with me. See you next time!

View the splits here (courtesy of WinSplits). For the raw splits file, click menu Results>Raw Splits Files.