Upper Marlboro MapRun

We’ve successfully brought our first-ever Distributed GPS Orienteering event at Patuxent River Park Upper Marlboro Natural Area to conclusion.

Some stats for our first-ever event of this kind:
Over the three-week period we had 100 registrations representing 155 total participants in all the group registrations. The results are shown below.

To see details and tracks, head over to MapRun Route Gadget here, or for detailed results by course, see:
Blue
Red
Green
Brown
Beige
Orange
Yellow
White

We know how our regular events could not happen without volunteers, and this distributed event was no different in that regard.

This event was rescheduled from September 2020; and would have been our first “COVID-normal” event, were it not for permitting challenges.

Our course setters were Mike and Pam Dvorsky, who designed and streamered the courses for September, and stayed engaged throughout the event, including checking streamer control sites in March and retrieving control streamers in late April.

Dave Linthicum donated his time and mapping skills to revise our base map – the core requirement for our sport.

Greg Lennon, our registrar, worked closely with me to develop our approach to registration over the weeks leading up to the event’s opening trying several tests until we found one that worked for everyone. Further, although transparent to most, as our webmaster, Greg continuously revised the QOC front page to ensure this event did not fall off the front page while the event was still in progress.

Sidney Sachs kept the interim results up to date throughout the event.

Hideharu Tanaka and one other participant let me know about a missing control streamer, which was corrected within a couple days of the report.

Valerie Meyer skipped her traditional role as epunch guru, and instead, took on the job of formatting our results for display below.

And of course, like any other event, we needed to recover our controls – in this case the streamers. So shout outs to Paul Collinson, Chris Silva, Richard Briggs, and Frantisek Brabec for volunteering to recover them; and to Serhot Ozturk, Robin Moon, and Bill Schork who were first on site to take them down, with Mike and Pam Dvorsky.

Our host and partner for the event was Tommy Baden of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, who helped make sure we could hold the event, despite the prohibitions on gatherings, and worked with me to develop the event procedures.

Finally, I’d like to extend our thanks to Peter Effeney, the author of MapRun for creating the tool, which enabled us to hold the event.

As the first event of this type, we had a great many moving parts to bring together, and the team made it look easy. This event was a privilege and pleasure to serve as Meet Director – Thank You!

-Craig Shelden