Discussion: Results and maps

Official results of Ontario's Toughest Navigation Race are posted here:
https://www.challengetheshield.ca/cts-run.html

Congrats to Eric Kemp and Andrew McLaren (Team Shored and Shield) for clearing the 33km course in just over 4hours. An impressive time. We had expected the top team to take 4.5 hours.

Top coed team was Ekaterina Menshova Nikolai Skavinskii on Team Adventure Aura. They take home our Squirrely George mascot for the year.

Top masters team was Team Jackson Triggs with Nick Duca and Lazlo Orosz. Top female team was Tree Huggers Jackie Tarnopolsky and Barb Campbell (Bash on AP).

A big thank you to Orienteering Canada for supporting our new Parry Sound club through an Adrian Zissos Development Fund.

We hope to see you next year in "Scandi Sound"

SAVE THE DATE!
3rd Annual Challenge the Shield Adventure Run (Parry Sound)
May the 4th be with you, 2025. (Sunday May 4, 2025)


2024 Race map #1:


2024 Race map #2:

It looks like a very successful event. I wish I was closer.

It doesn't look like the 'stages' are indicated on the maps. But if I understand correctly the first stage is to CP100.

For the CP difficulty rating, is it based on navigation and/or physical difficulty?

There is a linear point difference (25 points) between beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert (100 points) but a substantial point doubling to the next rating, backcountry (200 points). Is there anything special or unique about the backcountry CP rating? Are they mandatory CPs?

The CP grouping of the 69s don't seem to have a difficulty rating. Is that The Birch Bark(Ley) CPs?

Are the relay CPs on the race maps that you posted?

There might be value to orienteering to use a similar difficulty rating system for orienteering courses because it is already a public common rating system from the ski and mountain bike communities, and maybe some other outdoorsy communities as well. Could the O Technical Difficulty be stated as beginner, intermediate, advanced and expert, aka green circle, blue square, black diamond, double diamond? Not perfect but is it more accessible when trying to attract new people to orienteering....

Thanks a lot- to all volunteers. Was a lot of fun, and a great challenge. I wish this terrain was discovered ( for adventires or orienteering) at least couple of decades back :)

DGL started adopting the beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert, backcountry rating system 10 years ago. While the checkpoints farther away generally have more of the black diamond and double black diamonds and the checkpoints closer to the start/finish have more of the beginner green CPs, there are some beginner CPs in the west that are not on trails and there are some double blacks that are relatively straight forward close to the start/finish.

Just using the approach commonly used in rogaine course design and also because we hold a 2-hour race and it is confidence boosting for newbies to have success on a few high pointer CPs.

Why the big jump to backcountry 200 points. Partly so the 2-hour and 6-hour races can both have a nice round number points total to allow comparisons between years (1000 and 2,500). Also to help people get closer to our challenge levels (1000 bronze and up from there). Also to encourage teams to go to where we had a gear bag drop.

does that make sense?

Relay CPs were copied by teams off the master maps but they are essentially on the closest hills to the NW, West, and south of CP101.

AFter much discussion with Michael Raz to get this scoring system to work with MapRun we now have all CPs in 30s are 25 points, 40s are 50, 50s are 75, 60s are 100 and 100s are 200. As such going forward I will likely remove the difficulty icon adjacent to the control as it can remove important detail near the control.

Stage 1 is marked route at start then route choice to #100.

Happy to answer any other questions. Given the great feedback we have received we will likely need to increase the team capacity next year. Hopefully we have enough parking for 100 teams of 2.

Quick shout-out on behalf of Orienteering Ontario to Michael Raz who has been a huge help with people learning to use MapRun.

Thanks to all the organizers and their helpers! Once again, you pulled off a fantastic event.

Re point value and difficulty, I liked the mix. It's a nice course design to have some easier high value controls to make novices/slower teams feel good and some difficult/distant low value controls to mess with the minds of top teams who aren't sure if they need to clear the course.

Your plan for next year sounds great. Going between 45 and 55, we actually said, "OK, we're under the black diamond right now. Look for the place where it probably becomes legal to cross the wetland since we can't see it on the map." :)

An interesting approach taken by one rogaine designer was to assign a point value equal to the control number. He mixed up high and low value controls in the same way you do, then he had a scale of difficulty for the 2nd digit of the control number. So we knew that control 71 was easy and control 78 was difficult. Both controls were high value so he could sprinkle controls like that around the course to keep things interesting for teams of all abilities. I'm pretty sure that would make MapRun explode, lol! It was a good way to separate the concepts of difficulty and point value, which are sometimes thought to be directly correlated.

Not a propros to this event - really nice looking maps, by the way and a great array of sponsors - but I once talked to an event organizer who in score/ Rogaine events he assigned the larger scores to the closer/ easier controls and value diminised the further way from the arena was the control. His feeling was the same people, the Eric Kemps of the world, were going to win anyway but the point spread from first to worst would not be as large and that would make the also-rans possibly feel better.
Try it and see for yourself.

Fantastic race, already planning on next year (though please not too much Star Trek nerditry - though I acknowledge will be hard with Wil on board).
So many volunteers, results manually calculated under an hour, an entire pizza for each team, tiered awards for various point thresholds - there was so much going on under the hood here.
Enough glazing. Kudos.

Nanu nanu.

Wait, you mean there wasn’t a bunch of perfectly square lakes out there in the terrain? :P

But seriously. It’s something about the jolt of confidence and excitement that you get when finding a checkpoint labelled as a double black diamond level or backcountry - even as an elite orienteer - that makes it that much more engaging. For beginners or kids, even if the checkpoint isn’t necessary that difficult, the thrill of finding something rated as difficult is high.

Also bragging rights.

I agree with @Gordhun's event organizer on one point: the benefit of reducing the point spread. Course designers who only assign high point values to CPs primarily aimed at elite athletes end up rewarding the elites exponentially so there's a huge points gap. It's less motivating if a good navigator who can run 20 km can only get 25% of the points of a good navigator who can run 40 km.

I'm not keen on that organizer's plan to put *all* the high values near the arena though. AdventureGirl! deserves the thrill and bragging rights of finding a tough CP in a distant part of the map where regular mortals are unlikely to go.

I like the way CtS mixes the values all around the course. It entices people of all levels to explore a little farther.