Orienteering
What a blast! Orienteering is a kind of cross-country race with maps and compasses. It's entered the digital age with little electronic keys that you use to check in with at various points along the course, and when you're done you can download the information to get a printout of your times. Very cool. They have many different degrees of difficulty, but since we'd never done it before, I decided (in spite of Ziad's displeasure) that we were starting out with the easiest.
Our route took us up and down hills,
through the woods,
past a small lake,
past the coolest climbing tree ever,
and back to the parking lot. We liked it so much we hiked it again after completing it the first time. We weren't trying all that hard to race (in fact, before we began, I categorically stated that racing was OUT, we were just doing it to see what it was like) but I still thought our time of 32 minutes was pretty awesome. Apparently not. We came in 9th out of 17, which places us squarely in the bottom half of people who finished. (Results are here.) Well, next year, I'm going to get out my track shoes and train, because I know Ziad and Maya could have done it much faster if I hadn't been holding them back.
Our route took us up and down hills,
through the woods,
past a small lake,
past the coolest climbing tree ever,
and back to the parking lot. We liked it so much we hiked it again after completing it the first time. We weren't trying all that hard to race (in fact, before we began, I categorically stated that racing was OUT, we were just doing it to see what it was like) but I still thought our time of 32 minutes was pretty awesome. Apparently not. We came in 9th out of 17, which places us squarely in the bottom half of people who finished. (Results are here.) Well, next year, I'm going to get out my track shoes and train, because I know Ziad and Maya could have done it much faster if I hadn't been holding them back.
Labels: field trips
posted by Sarah at 10:06 AM
3 Comments:
Impressive! I have a real struggle being out in nature but this looks fun. Is it through a group?
Yeah, it's through the Bay Area Orienteering Club. If you click to look at the results, you'll be able to navigate around their website. This particular event is apparently annual. The park is a good one to know about, too, because once you get to the summit, there is some up and down but nothing extreme like there is down here on the valley floor. So you can have a nice, fairly level hike in some beautiful terrain.
We need to plan a hike some time in the fall before the rain starts. I really need to work up my endurance to stay with the growing kid.
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