The CROC Training committee is offering short courses for members on Wednesday evenings in July, so that new course designers can design courses, and all members can have fun orienteering at parks in Portland. This year, all four course designers have had some experience. 

Short Courses are meant to be fun and easy to put on. There are no fees, no results, no e-punch, no choice of course - just fun.

Times are 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm.

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Cully Park: Dogbone

Cully is a new park, relatively open and flat, located at 5810 NE 72nd Avenue in Portland. To make the orienteering more interesting, the training Short Course will be a dogbone course. Here's how it works: there will be ten controls, but each control has two flags (at different locations), so there will be a total of 20 flags. You may visit the two flags for each control in either order, but you must do the controls in order. So you may end up going to 1B, 1A, 2A, 2B, 3B, 3A, etc., but not to either flag at control 2 before going to both flags at control 1. In case you are wondering, the map will show the two circles for each flag at a control connected by a line, which ends up looking a little like a bone. Hence the name. 

The exercise is designed to force you to constantly think ahead and make route choices. It would be fun with a mass start, so you can practice not being distracted by what everyone else is doing, but I don't think we can count on everyone showing up at the same time. There are a total of 1,024 different routes (although I think only a few hundred are reasonable). Choose quickly; choose wisely.

 The course will be about 2 km. For more exercise and fun, you can run the course again making the opposite choices at each control. Or run it backwards (the course, not backwards running).

 Register by July 12 to get a map and the exact meeting location.

For questions or suggestions, contact trainer Tox Mike or training coordinator Anndy Wiselogle.