Connecticut Hill Rogaine by Eric Smith, meet director Sunny, cooler, less humid....what more reason does one need to get out in the woods for a few hours on the weekend? Competition! At least that was what was driving many of the 112 runners taking part in the Connecticut Hill Rogaine last weekend. This was the 5th annual Rogaine event put on by the Central New York Orienteering Club, the largest attendance yet, with people driving or flying in from 8 other states and three foreign countries to supplement a substantial field of more local competitors. Maps were issued at 10:30 on Saturday morning to give people a chance to do some thinking about route choices before the noon start. The object of the event was to visit as many as possible of 60 control locations marked in the Connecticut Hill Wildlife Management Area and the adjoining Newfield State Forest, covering an area of about 80 square kilometers. An optimal course to reach all of the control points and get back to the finish would have involved covering about 75 km, with about 3-4 km of up and down to contend with as well. And that isn't kilometers of trail or road, that's a mix of running through woods and fighting through underbrush! Needless to say, the 6 and 12 hour competitors were not even thinking about trying to visit all controls, but trying to figure out which combination would be most worthwhile. Different controls were worth point values ranging from 10-60 points, so some were more important to get than others. The maximum possible score was 2100 points, and the winning team in the 24 hour event picked up 1770 of them (and was in the vicinity of 2 others worth another 60 points, but didn't find the actual markers). Both the 6 and 24 hour races were very closely contested, with no team confident of victory before the final tallying of the points, while the smaller field in the 12 hour event was clearly dominated by the Canadian team `Dumb and Dumber' , brothers Bill and Brent Jarvis who scored 900 points, 130 more than the closest competition, the Rochester `Brooks' father and son team of Doug and Stephen Brooks. The 6 hour event was very closely contested, with the winning team of Stephen Kreger of Rochester and Alan Evans of Corning edging out Jon Sundquist of Buffalo and Jaani Latanen of Helsinki by a score of 790 to 760. Jon and Jaani had been unsuccessful at finding one 60 point control during the afternoon, and that made the difference. (Jaani is a Finnish university student who is going to be at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario next semester. He found out about the race over the Internet, and rearranged his travel plans to fit it in, sending e-mail to find out if the organizers could find him a good strong partner. We did!) The next team back was a team of Masters age group orienteers from Rochester, Richard Detwiler and Larry Zygo, considerably back from the two lead teams, but also well ahead of the rest of the pack. Three trailrunners from Horseheads, the DuBois family of Dick, Jeff, and Mike were next, followed closely by Ann and Charles Leonard of Freeville, the first mixed gender team, who were in turn just ten points ahead of second and third place mixed teams `O' Yes and `O' No from Connecticut. Another 10 points back were local trail runners of note, Joe Dabes and Janet Stein. Of all the 51 teams entered in the three races, only one pushed the time limit too far and received penalty points at the rate of 30 per minute for being overtime, a slip that cost Ed Stabler and Stephen Stibler 5 places for misjudging their time by half a percent! While there was intense competition among some of the faster teams, a number of the teams further back in the scoring were taking a rather more recreational approach, several teams going out for less than the full 6 hours, and treating it as an interesting off-trail hike with a goal. Almost everyone seemed pleased with their personal performances, and with the day, the weather, the scenery, the placement of controls, and the food afterwards. The 24 hour event was also quite close, perhaps more so than the score would indicate. By 2 am when both the leading teams had come in to get some food and take a few hours off to sleep, they had each accumulated about 1100 points, with the local team `Jerry Lives' of Mark Dominie and Craig Murray having arrived by midnight and eaten and gone to bed before the competition from NYC had arrived. In the morning, though, `The Two Guys from Queens', Bernard Breton and Greg Balter, seemed to have a little more energy left and pulled ahead decisively in the final count to take a 1690 to 1610 lead. Another Central New York team, `Central New York Out-of-Shape Rogaining Team' comprised of Peter Dady and Bob Ireland, came surprisingly close to the two pre-race favorites with a score of 1550. They and the fourth place team of Trey Porto and Geoff Zassenhaus, two Cornell graduate students, both had chosen a superior route to that taken by the two lead teams (ignoring the 250 points worth of controls in Newfield State Forest altogether, as those had a severe distance penalty associated with them), but just didn't quite have the physical strength to win it this year. There was definitely some talk about not being quite so out-of-shape for next year, when CNYO will probably be hosting the North American Rogaine Championships! Susan Grandjean and Jessica Rykken from Vermont, who started their Rogaining teamwork together two years ago with a win in the women's category on a `blind date', both having needed partners and being matched up by the meet director, continued their winning ways this year. `Partners in Grime' was a clear 100 point victor over the O'Keeffe sisters, one of whom was visiting from Ireland and pressed into service by her teammate. Olaf and Mette Tabur, always using their misleading team name of `The Old and Slow', were as usual a threat in the mixed masters category, in fact leading all teams in the masters category. The majority of the people participating were `veteran' Rogainers, but we had quite a pleasing turnout of first-timers. We hope that they and many others will turn up for next year's LOST OF THE MOHICANS Rogaine at the Brookfields Trails near Utica. For those with Internet access and an interest in learning more about the sport of orienteering in the Ithaca area, information including a complete set of results from the Connecticut Hill Rogaine is available on the Web at http://pasta.graphics.cornell.edu/mkc/orienteering/cnyo/ Those without the computer connection can get information by contacting Mitch Collinsworth at 539-6625 or Eric Smith at 347-4844.