Rogaine in the Allegany

I enjoy the FLRC selection of road and trail races, but was recently recruited by a skiing friend, Pete Dady, for a different kind of running experience called a rogaine. As a rank amateur I was baptized both figuratively and physically, because it rained most of the time. The 24 hour rogaine was held July 15th and 16th in Allegany State Park located in Southern New York on the Pennsylvania border.

Pete called up a day before the entry deadline and started the bidding:

Pete: " Would you like to do a rogaine?"

Jim: "I guess but only the six hour one."

Pete: "The six hour one is for runners. We would have to work too hard."

Jim: "Okay, I'll go for the 12 hour one, but I don't know about the dark."

Pete: "24 hours is better: we use flashlights at night."

Jim: "I want at least six hours of sleep."

Pete: "We will sleep in my tent at the base camp."

Jim: "Okay, I'll do it."

The night before race day we headed down to Elmira and over to the small town of Salamanca, and in short order hooked up with the Central New York Orienteering Club at the base camp located in the middle of the park. Mark Domine had his RV there, and we pitched our tent nearby with two other teams from the club having done the same. They were talking big and telling those tall pre-race stories as they barbecued steaks and downed beer. One point should be made here. This event, unlike trail running, requires a large thinking component involving orienteering and route selection skills. Mark was the king of the sport, having made the map for seven of the last ten national orienteering events, which of course excluded him from competing in those events. Therefore, despite their lack of ultra running conditioning these guys and gals from Central New York were to be reckoned with.

The teams drifted in and a total of about 70 teams were on hand by the 10:30am meeting the next day. A caution on stinging nettles, with a wilted specimen for all to see, was given. The hard working organizers of the event were identified. Buffalo Orienteering Club hosted this event. The mapper, Jon Sundquist, warned us about the park boundaries. If you end up in Pennsylvania you are too far south. Also, the park is surrounded on three sides by Indian land, and they really don't want you on their land. He had told us that during mapping one day he was approached by an Indian who asked for all his mapping stuff. He was able to convince the Indian that things were cool and got safely home with everything. Then the big moment arrived; the maps were given out.

About an hour remained before the 12 noon start and teams scurried to private places to devour the long awaited wonder. It was huge one and a-half by three feet in size. Its scale was 1:30,000 with 20-foot contour intervals. Scattered around the map were small circles with a three-digit number associated with each circle. The first digit was very important in the route selection stage that Pete and I were just about to start. The higher the number the more points you would get on finding the control, which was located in the small circle. Controls were orange and white cubes about a foot on a side, which were hung in trees. If your orienteering brought you close enough, you would see it easily. Here was the task before us: factor in the points, distance between circles, the contour line changes, availability of trails, versus bush whacking, which controls had water, draw the route on the map, and finally decide what things to take or leave at base camp (my choices would prove to be very costly for our team).

I must admit Pete was hoping for some input from me here, and he got nothing as I tried to comprehend orienteering map symbols and terminology. I figured the only thing that mattered was getting back for my six-hour snooze. You see he had told me about the 24 hour rogaine he did last year when they stumbled into base camp and saw their competition going out. They changed their minds about sleeping and went right back out. That wasn't going to happen as I saw it, because I was still thinking of this as a camping trip for 25 dollars, where no matter what time of day it was there would be cooks at the base camp to cook you all sorts of wonderful good things

The real pros like the Domanes and the Stewarts were using strings to measure out routes and doing things like calculating points per kilometer for different routes. We resorted to the mental method, which was probably a mistake if you are serious. Our plan was to take a big loop down south and return by evening to the upper northwest corner. Here we would take advantage of ski trails to walk on at night, which are easier than being in the dark forest, and pick up controls as out and backs. The second loop would be at first light, and we would go to the west of the central park road that split the rogaine map.

Then it came time to select the gear for our first of two loops from base camp. I had brought a heavy rechargeable battery pack with a 10-watt head lamp for the night. Pete said that was heavy and I would be carrying it for nine hours until it was dark. He said just bring my penlight, which he had told me to purchase. So I did.

We got to the starting line in time and a mass of people took off in all directions. We found very few people heading in our direction, which wasn't a good thing in some respects. After about an hour and a half we had found two controls, which even I knew wasn't good considering there were 58 controls out there. However, it turned out that the terrain was so difficult that the winning team only managed to get 32 controls. Then there was thunder, and rain followed quickly and I was wondering if switching to 12 hours was something Pete would go for.

As we moved south I got interested in the orienteering, learning something different at every approach to a control. I was beginning to be captivated by Pete's ability at orienteering, which had been honed from years of practice both on foot and skis. Unlike a rogaine, orienteering races don't have a route selection process, because there is a sequence of stops you have to follow. Efficiency and speed are paramount in getting around the course.

At controls Pete would punch the card with the special punch for that control, which proved we had visited the control. I would write in our team name, the time, and the next control we planned to visit, which I assumed was for search and rescue purposes, but allows you to check out other competitors.

We started to stray from the plan early on by saying lets follow this ridge and pick up this control because it would require less elevation change. Other times we would do an out and back to get one that we hadn't planned on getting. This was another blunder because we kept losing time as we slowly worked our way south. It got latter and latter and I kept waiting to turn north to get to the ski trails. We found ourselves at eight o'clock near the Pennsylvania border on the Finger Lakes Trail.

The FLT starts at the PA border and goes through the Finger Lakes and then south to the Catskills. I was torn to go down and see this mystical spot, which was also the beginning of the Conservation Trail to Niagara Falls. I was getting tired and losing focus on the event as can be imagined.

We made the park highway that runs north and south. A short distance down the road was a 60-point control, which was the farthest control to the southeast. It was getting dark and Pete said let's get out the flashlights for this one. I pulled out my penlight and he said get your penlight, and I said this is my penlight. I knew we had a little communication problem here, as Pete showed a look of frustration. So we took off and got the control, our first at night, and I realized we were going to have a tough time with my lack of flashlight wattage.

It was time to take a break and regroup. We sat down on a nice stone bridge wall and opened up the map. I proceeded to put the now non-penlight to good use as it lit up the map just beautifully. The good news was that we had to be going north now because if we went a farther south we would end up in Pennsylvania. The bad news was that the ski trails couldn't be farther away, and our plan had been to be there at dark. As the surgeon says during the operation when he makes a mistake, "whoops". Those who successfully executed this plan did very well accumulating points.

The revised plan was to take the road back to the base camp, and pick up controls along the way. We heard something below the bridge and spied a raccoon starting its nighttime foraging. It just looked at us and then was on its way. We decided to be on our way also. So we now had a 12 K road race just to get back to the base camp.

We picked up an 80-point control, the highest point value for a control, as an out and back from the road (little did we know that this would be our last control until eight am). The wet logs, lack of light, and tired legs just weren't helping my spirits, besides I wanted my six hours sleep. Pete had some blisters from walking for nine hours with wet feet, and we decided to jog the road right back to base camp. Time slipped away as a jog turned into an endless-road walk, and it was around two am that we got in for food. We were finally asleep by three am.

We were awake around six am, so much for my six hours of sleep. The map was out and we were fired up now. We had made so many blunders by this time that we both had the attitude of saving face and showing Pamola, an Indian hill spirit, that we were worthy of headdresses with many feathers. I had sensed relatives of the Virgil Monster that live in the Allegany. They must have been laughing at our mistakes, because they didn't bother trying to scare us away.

We had dialed in on the route planing by now. The key was knowing what we could cover on this hilly terrain as shown on a 1:30,000 scale. The second thing we agreed on was not to be afraid of going down into a valley and then up to a ridge. We had lost time fooling around trying to follow ridges. We took off running: the sun was out and our spirits high. The woods on this side of the road were more open allowing us to pick up the pace. We went hard for four hours. Just before getting in we had one questionable control of 60 points that was an out and back. We stopped where we had to decide, and I asked how much time to get into base camp from here and pick up a 40 pointer on route. Pete said 40 minutes. I calculated we had 20 minutes to get this control, if we went for 10 minutes and couldn't find it we needed to turn back to get on route again in another 10 minutes. We vetoed going for it and made it back at around 11:50. We would have been over. And for every minute you are out past noon you lose 10 points. We had accumulated 400 of our 1200 points in this last four-hour loop. We were seventh in our category, which was okay by me. Pamola must have been proud of our recovery, and we had earned our feathers (if only small ones!)

-- Jim Hoch