From HoverCloud

Orienteering

I am a member of the Bay Area Orienteering Club (http://baoc.org). What is orienteering? A sport I enjoy a lot, since it gets me in the great outdoors to enjoy the big trees and pretty flowers. You get to run around in the woods with a map and a compass trying to find the best way through the terrain. I often wear the club uniform (below, on right) while orienteering.

I attended the Spooner Lake 2-day U.S. Orienteering Championships in the summer of 1999. It's a great opportunity to see how fast the really good people can go and aspire to be like them. The course I run each of the two days of a meet like this usually takes me around 2 hours, covering around 9 or more kilometers of terrain and including somewhere around 600 meters of climb. Needless to say there are some great views from the tops of those hills in the Sierras. You can orienteer too. It's easy to start, as a beginners' workshop is usually provided at each of the local club events. The entry level courses do not leave the trails, so you needn't fear getting lost in the woods on your first time out.

About the Uniform

Here I am in my full orienteering getup. I usually wear all of this at orienteering meets because it's fun to be dressed up in the club uniform and it helps me make it through the course more easily. At orienteering events in other states, there are a lot of people from our club because the Bay Area Orienteering Club is one of the largest in the nation. It's easy to recognize the people in the club by the colors of their uniform, even from a great distance, and this makes watching relay races more exciting.

The uniform is made of a light nylon mesh that doesn't tear and doesn't absorb water. It keeps me quite cool, even in the hot sun. It covers me from ankle to wrist and protects me from the various things in the woods that scratch, bite, or itch (ie. thorns, ticks, and poison oak). The yellow gators around my shins provide extra padding in case I whack my leg against a fallen log. I wear shoes that have cleats on them. Each cleat has a metal stud on it that helps it grip on fallen logs or rocky surfaces.

I also typically carry a watch, a compass, a map, a punch card, and an emergengy whistle. If something happens to you in the woods, you blow the emergency whistle three times to signal you need help. Repeat blowing the whistle until you lose consciousness, er, I mean, you are rescued.