There are many ways for an event to become a disaster. I will give a few personal examples below.
Note that I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but I go to Los Angeles, California for orienteering events. Feel free to listen to watch the video/listen to the music while reading my profile.
My father brought me out to my first orienteering meet, whereas the rest of the team had known how to orienteer because they had been to a few events. My course was the Yellow course, which is the second easiest course they had available. I had started off a bit fast on the magnetic north side of the map going on points from east to west, then I had to go a bit south of the main road. I had to find a few more points, but these were going up to some massive rock slabs in the top left side of the center of the map, forming an arch between hills. One of these slabs while I was running down to find a point, collapsed by breaking in half. It was my first event and I found myself in a life-or-death situation.
I was too weak from running that day to climb up from the slab, so i actually grabbed the rocks and inched my way downward. I had to take a long time to inch my way down, and it was a lot of pressure because i would have landed 15 feet straight into a bunch of cactus.
All this was in the middle of point 9 and 13 shown on the map under.
Large map of venue (not course) here:
This is a pretty safe place, a beautiful urban environment that is relatively flat with widespread contours of 2.5 meters. But it is inside Elysian park that is dangerous. Going up the east side of the map, west side of the park, I had to climb up a massive hill to find one last trivia station. I went down the hill and fell into poison oak. No big deal, except for a week later, there were mosquito bite-looking bumps all over my legs, and everyone in 8th grade noticed. My crush even inched slowly away from me as she had never done.
This is also known as the "Place with the Hollywood sign". This place has tons of trails with lots of elevation differences. There were several cliffs that me and my father had to scale up and inch our way down. At one point, my father was down on the street near the pedestrian bridge at the front of Griffith Observatory (the black dot near the bottom left side of the map), and I was still up on a cliff over 20 feet. It required mutual trust in order to get me down from there to snipe the observatory points.
This was my second time doing the course at Santa Fe Dam, but my first time doing a Red (2nd Hardest) level course. Route choice can really make a difference. I was going up to my 4th point that is up near the top right with all the contour lines (the only real hill in the course. I should have went a bit farther down the trail and then cut to the left to reach my next point, but instead I went through the field of cactus marked in dark green. I actually fell in it, and it hurt me, my time, and my running.
:fp: This was my freshman year, where I was one of three people representing my school in the varsity male course. On my way to point number three on Day 1, I fell into a hollowed out trunk, where I hurt my heel and my calves. I was able to speed up the rest of the course and finish, but an hour after getting back to the hotel, I seemed to have plantar fasciitis, where I couldn't move my heel without immense pain. (EDIT: I did terrible for the first three points, so I ended up at~73rd place, being the fastest on my team). I had to ice down my entire foot for the whole night, and by morning I was still competing, but I had to walk the whole course. I actually did good, but got second place for my team. The second day was an obvious speed course where, if I hadn't been injured, I definitely could have gotten into the top 20, (but I was number 80), but overall I was at number 71 for the Varsity Males, but only freshman in that category. I wasn't upset, just disappointed.
http://www.gaorienteering.org/live/Combined.html
http://www.racerpal.com/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=145
http://www.racerpal.com/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.cgi?act=map&id=146
(both are varsity male)
This was my second time doing this event, but this event was a troll. Green course and f*cking 24 points. I almost ate sh*t a few times, but I still got 4th place.
