Peggy sent me some maps from a recent Quantico event (I don't remember the details of the event and I deleted Peggy's email). The terrain and course looks interesting. Check it out:

http://www.geocities.com/okansas.geo/trot2000/peggy1.html http://www.geocities.com/okansas.geo/trot2000/peggy2.html http://www.geocities.com/okansas.geo/trot2000/peggy3.html

-- Spike (meglin@juno.com), December 18, 2000

Answers

Here's some details. The course is the Blue from the Mid-Atlantic Championships, held on Dec.4th. The map is new, and the terrain is completely different from anything QOC has mapped before. It is a former gravel mining area, alongside a river, and so the dominant features are small mining scars (knolls, pits, broken ground, ditches, ponds) and water features (beaver ponds, waterholes, marshes of all kinds). It is very flat, with some thick thorny woods, and wet. The scale of the map (1:7500) hints at the level of detail. There's a good trail network; after a good rain the trails tend to flood (I "ran" on one trail this fall where the water was over my knees...). I was the course-setter, and Dave Linthicum helped put out controls and worked the day of the race roaming the park to replace any stolen controls (4 were stolen in the week before the event). Race day was cold (low 20s to low 30s) but sunny so quite pleasant for a run. The map is at the edge of Bowie State University (just 3 miles from home!), and we were able to get use of the gym lobby for registration and results. Many participants made a point of telling me how much they enjoyed the terrain. If you're a good navigator, it is very fast, given the lack of climb and all the trails. The winning time on the Blue course was 58:21, run by the Naval Academy's Vytenis Benetis. The real race was for second: a Bulgarian living in DC beat Eddie Bergeron by 10 seconds, 64:40 to 64:50. Being a regional championship event and a new map/area brought out the numbers, with 164 starts/c. 190 competitors. One of our biggest events this year.

I hated to miss the Trot, and I didn't even get to run, but this was a nice replacement.

-- Peggy (Pdickison@aol.com), December 18, 2000.