Orienteers point their compasses toward Lynn Woods

This year, the US Orienteering Championships will put Lynn Woods on their map.The championships, hosted by the Cambridge Sports Union orienteering club, will take place in Eastern Massachusetts for three days this weekend: at Franklin Park in Boston on Friday, at Lynn Woods on Saturday and at the Middlesex Fells on Sunday. Lynn Woods has not hosted such an event since the 1970s.The sport of orienteering is similar to activities in the Boy and Girl Scouts, as well as land navigation in the US Army. It takes place in a forested area, and each participant receives a map of the course and a compass. The map includes a series of landmarks (ranging from 6 to 20 points) that the participant must reach in the order that they are depicted.The actual points will be recognizable by a flag on race day. They may include geographical features such as “a rock, trail intersection, corner of a pond, building, small knoll, something well defined,” said CSU president Larry Berman. “You get a map, and a circle is drawn around each point.”However, the route that competitors take to get to these points is up to them ? and this, Berman said, is “the crux of the sport. Read and interpret the map and pick the route that is best for you.”Participants compete one at a time, running against the clock. Times depend on both the course and the age group. Courses are defined by the estimated time it would take someone to win. Thus, Friday’s race at Franklin Park (which happens to take place on Berman’s 77th birthday) is a 17-minute “sprint,” while Saturday’s is a 35-minute “middle distance” at Lynn Woods and Sunday’s at the Fells is longer than either of them. It is estimated that the first-place man will finish in 80 minutes and the first-place woman in 70 minutes.Yet to hear Berman describe it, the events seem to involve navigation as much as acceleration, if not more so.”It is a rush when (the flag on a point) is there,” Berman said, “because you have just solved a problem successfully ? There is an internal mental reward, no matter if you are just walking the course, of getting to the flag and realizing you’ve done it just right.”There are currently 315 people who have registered for the event at Lynn Woods on Saturday, and their ages range from 10 to 80 years old. The field will include international participants, representing such nations as Sweden, Germany and Canada.Orienteering events stopped taking place at Lynn Woods after local orienteers could not find the resources to update their map for the reservation, Berman said. Ironically, the period in which the woods were not used for the sport made them attractive as a site for orienteers looking for a “new” challenge about 40 years later.”It was one of the only pieces of forest that didn’t have a modern map,” Berman said. “So, we could use it.”He said that the City of Lynn has been “very helpful, very accommodating,” including park ranger Dan Small.Orienteering came to the US from Scandinavia, and today it is a merit badge for both Boy and Girl Scouts. Berman said that the Army has brought its land navigation techniques “closer and closer” to orienteering.Orienteering is not an Olympic sport, but it features both a World Championships and a World Cup, with each usually taking place abroad. Berman, a former member of the Board of Directors of the US Orienteering Federation, and his wife Sara Mae traveled across Europe to cover the World Championships for the national orienteering magazine over a 14-year period.Rich Tenorio can be reached at [email protected].