U.S. National Rogaine Championships

Photo by Cristina Fillis (with help from self-timer)
Scott Markham, Cristina Fillis and Mike Bitton posed for a team photo during the Big Muddy Rogaine 3 orienteering competition near Antelope, Ore.

In a continuing effort to become a more proficient navigator, I competed in the Big Muddy Ranch Rogaine 3 in Central Oregon over the weekend. Though it sounds like a convention for the prematurely bald, a "rogaine" is in fact an orienteering (map and compass) competition.

I stuck with the husband-and-wife duo that took me on my first orienteering event a while back, Scott Markham and Cristina Fillis of Portland, Ore. They volunteer at all the Wicked Adventure Racing sprint races in the Portland area. Our team name for the Big Muddy was Lost and Never Found. We competed in the 8-hour, co-ed category. Other categories included "12 in 24," where teams could spend no more than 12 total hours on the course during the 24-hour race period. The third and final category was a full 24-hours on the course.

Scott and Cris are very mellow people and easy to get along with. They like to have fun, so the time we spent on the hunt for our chosen control points flew by. Our goals were to navigate as efficiently as possible from control point to control point, and to make sure we did not push ourselves so hard that we were no longer having fun. We each had our own map and compass, and we all navigated together as a team.

In a rogaine event, there are many control points spread out over an area so large, it's supposed to be impossible for any team to get to all of them beford the competition ends. Our team hit all six of the control points we wanted to find. I tended to think we were closer to the control points than we usually were, so I always thought, "This is it! Look! This has to be it!" Every time I was premature. So that's one thing I learned about myself as a navigator. I am an optomist. I need to be teamed up with a realist, or even better, two of them, like Scott and Cris. On more than one occasion, Cris set us boys straight as to where we were really supposed to be looking for our control points. Her patient manner and absolutely practical approach to navigation saved us hours of hunting in areas that were not quite the areas we thought we were in.

Before and after the competition, I enjoyed talking to several adventure racers in attendance. Three members of Seattle-based team DART-nuun were there, including Glenn Rogers and Aaron Rinn, who raced together in the 24-hour category; and Matt Hart, who raced in the 8-hour category with Krissy, a rising star on the U.S. ultra-marathon circuit. Ultras are races of more than 26 miles. I also saw members of the Mergeo.com, Missing Link and Mountains Plus (MPGear.com) at the event. It's fun to catch up with so many friends. I'll see most of them next week at the TRIOBA sprint adventure race in Ellensburg, Wash.

I haven't seen the results of the Big Muddy yet, but when I do, I will update this post to let everyone know the outcome of our efforts. The experience was a big confidence builder for all of us, and a lengthy enough amount of time to let us know we work well together. I will compete with these two any time they ask, because I respect them immensely and they took wonderful care of me.