Steve Munatones over at the Daily News of Open Water Swimming recently wrote an article detailing a new open water event, open water orienteering (OWO). OWO, the dream-child of Chris Dahowski at Swim22, involves one swimmer and one kayaker or paddle-boarder. The duo are assigned a series of buoys that they must visit in order, stamping a card that the kayaker carries once they reach the buoy. The duo are only limited by the speed of the swimmer. By the end of the race, the swimmer and kayaker will have covered something like 6000 meters.
My boys used to be boy scouts, and while they were scouts, I was an adult volunteer. My "thing" with the troop was orienteering. Good old fashioned orienteering: just you and a compass and map. I always wanted to do it as a kid (also a boy scout), but never got a chance to do the "O".
International Orienteering Symbol...what will the OWO symbol look like?
But as an adult, I helped our troop get involved in orienteering. And I learned a lot about O-sport. Point-to-point orienteering (or line orienteering) is what we think of when we think of the sport: you're given a map with control points that you need to visit in the order shown. Normally you're only given the map a few minutes before the start, and the start is staggered so as to avoid anyone just following someone else. You have to visit the controls and punch a card with a puncher that is attached to the control. Often, other controls will be on the ground, sometimes to trick you and sometimes simply because they are controls for other courses. (Courses of varying difficulty can be run on the same area.) Often, the fastest way to each control is not the direct route, and the best orienteers are those who can read their map and find the fastest way to each control, avoiding ditches, cliffs and bodies of water. The winner is the person who runs through the course, punches all controls and finishes in the quickest time. Because of the staggered start, you might not know if you're the winner until well after you've finished.
But that is not the only type of orienteering. My favorite has got to be score orienteering. In score orienteering, competitors are given maps showing many controls. Each control is worth a set amount of points, based on the difficulty of getting to it, and orienteers have a set amount of time to reach as many controls as they can within the time limit. If they arrive past the deadline, they lose points. Perhaps that last control is worth enough points to warrant the time penalty? The winner is the competitor with the most points.
Orienteering equipment is made for the outdoors, and I think would be appropriate for swimmers. There are compasses out there that strap to the hand, and most likely enterprising and ingenious OW swimmers who could construct a compass that will fit on the back of their hand. (If compasses would even be needed for OWO, that is! We'll have to wait and see how Chris's events go.)
I hope that Chris's OWO events in California are a big hit. Even more so, I hope that we see other OWO events in the future. I see no reason why we couldn't have teams of two swimmers visiting the buoys. Or why not one swimmer? How about a swimming version of relay orienteering, where a team of, say, three swimmers each complete a 2k loop, visiting control buoys in order, and running back up the beach to hand off the punch card to the next swimmer? I especially like the idea of a score orienteering event. I imagine a lake with many inlets. Some buoys would be quite a distance away from the start, but be worth a significant amount of points. Perhaps some controls could be on the beach? Who knows...
