Category: People

March OUSA Member Spotlight: Ali Crocker

Ali Crocker running at 2022 Masters Nationals.

This is a transcript of an interview with Ali in March, 2025. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Cristina Luis: Ali, I would like to hear about your athletic background, from the beginning, and how that melds into orienteering. 

Alison Crocker: From the very beginning? Okay.

As early as you want to go. It doesn’t have to be the very beginning.

Okay. I think at my earliest ages I was dragged along to running races with my parents. Totally loved doing all the kids’ races. So I was active from the beginning, and then probably the first serious sport I did was cross-country skiing, up through young juniors. I went to a ski academy for one year–where Alex Jospe currently coaches. I just went there for the winter trying to take skiing really seriously. But then I went to a boarding school where there was more snow than at my house so I could ski but still do academics. And it was there that I discovered two new sports. First, I discovered rowing, which I took seriously for quite a while during all of high school.

And then I also actually discovered orientering during high school with a math teacher who told us what orientering was at morning chapel. I thought it sounded super cool. I signed up and I went a few times to NEOC and UNO meets and totally loved it from the very beginning. But on my third or fourth meet, I was running down some woodsy hillside and my shoulder fell out of its socket. I couldn’t row for the rowing team for a week while it healed and my rowing coach told me I couldn’t do any more of that orienteering thing, whatever it was that got me injured. So that was the end of my early days orienteering. But I knew I liked it from that experience. Through high school I was super competitive in cross-country skiing, super competitive in rowing, and was on the junior world teams for both of those.

I went to Junior Worlds once for rowing in Lithuania and two or three times for cross-country skiing, and then competed in U23s in college. In college my first year I did both skiing and rowing. But it turned out that that was too much, because rowing has a competition season in fall, skiing does in winter and then rowing does again in the spring, and my body was just totally not happy after that. So I quit rowing after the first year.

I just focused on cross-country skiing and didn’t do any orienteering at that time because there was no time and I didn’t know many people who were doing it. I did do a lot with the outing club, which was really fun. I was on the woodsman’s team, and we competed in that which was super fun, we ran up trees with spikes on our feet…

And this is Dartmouth, for context.

Yeah, this is Dartmouth. It’s basically like Colby and Dartmouth and a bunch of agricultural colleges seem to have Woodsman’s teams.

Tell me more about the woodsman’s team. What activities did you compete in?

So you compete in different events–in chopping, in splitting, in fire building, in running up the pole. All those different events. Crosscut sawing. I didn’t do the chainsaw events, but those were part of it.

Was there any axe throwing?

Yeah, there was, but I usually was not our team’s axe thrower.

Yeah all right, but lots of wood manipulating in other ways.

Yep.

Really cool. How does competitive fire building work?

You have a team of two people, and you’re given a single cedar log, three matches, and a pot of water. The first team to boil water wins. I remember there was this one event, it was really windy, and we used up our three matches so I had to run over to get more. But I had been using a knife to split the log and I didn’t put it down. So I was running as fast as I could towards the official, with this knife in my hand, and they were like, “Woah, drop the knife!” 

So, definitely relevant to orienteering. And you continued skiing, this is the off-season from skiing?

Yeah, that was off-season. 

For skiing, my senior year of college I took the fall quarter off and tried to really seriously train for the Olympics. And I did very seriously train for the Olympics, and then there were Olympic trials and I don’t know… In my best event I did not have good skis. The year before I’d come in second in the US national cross-country like five or 10k classic and then that year for team trials I was eighth or something, and so I was up there but not close enough to make the team. So I’d tried hard to make the Olympic team.

But I did get a Rhodes scholarship that year and I was going to defer it if I did make the Olympics. I didn’t make the Olympics so I went to Oxford, which does not have snow.

It’s not a good skiing destination.

Nope.

And then I really knew I had to finish–in England PhDs are only three years. Most people do Masters before them. I didn’t. So I knew I was going to have to work really hard to finish a PhD in three years. I was just going to forget about sports. My life was taking me in other ways, and that worked well for two months. And then I ran in the intramural cross-country race and came in really high in the results and the cross-country team was, “great, you’re racing for our JV team against Cambridge two weeks from now.” I was like, what? I didn’t know this was part of the deal. And then I was the top Oxford runner in that.

And so I ended up being the backup for the varsity team and then someone did actually break their nose and I ended up running on the varsity cross-country team three weeks later. And so I got very involved very quickly in cross-country running. And then it turned out the orienteering team captain was one of the cross-country runners and he told me I should come and try orienteering. And that’s where I met [former US Team member] Boris [Granovskiy] on a bus to a little rinky dink area near Oxford. When I went orienteering for the fourth or fifth time in my life and kind of rediscovered it and liked it again immediately.

I was not super fast my first time because there was a lot to figure out about the map. And afterwards I just started orienteering a ton with the university team. And did that for the two and a half more years that I was at Oxford. 

What year was that you first went to an orienteering event in Oxford? 

Early 2007.

You had your adult introduction to orienteering in 2007 and then in 2008 you ran a World Cup race with us, at O-Ringen in Sweden. That’s where we first met.

Yeah. 

Just getting a timeline here because that’s fun. That’s pretty quick. Clearly your endurance background helped immensely. And then how about the map reading part, how do you think you developed that? As someone who was fit coming in, were you outrunning your navigation a lot early on?

Yeah. At the beginning a ton. I was like, “what do these squiggles mean?” I just needed to look at them. So I have all these memories of when I would definitely consistently make five minute errors and I’d run fast and get a lot of the time back. But I would be genuinely very confused and lost quite frequently in a race and I’d be happy when the navigation was simple because it meant I could run harder. It was pretty friendly to learn in southern England, to be honest because it’s not super detailed and complicated and so it was a friendly place to start to learn how to navigate. And then I remember the first national level meets in England that I went to and they totally kicked my butt because they were on more complicated maps in the north. And then having to adjust to that and study those. 

Ali at the 2022 Middle Champs. Photo by Clinton Morse.

But the Oxford Orienteering Club did great training. We went to the Lake District and other places and I really learned a lot from my teammates. We’d meet up in the pub after the meets and really talk through the race and they’d be like, “Why didn’t you go that way,” or, “could have looked at this?” And was like, “yeah, I could have.” And so I learned a lot from doing those analyses with teammates and from our training camps. One of the varsity races was in Uppsala and that was my first time trying to navigate in that really detailed vague terrain.

In the wilderness.

Yeah.

The O club was really active it sounds like.

Yeah. We went to meets on a lot of weekends, just like the local meets and then we’d go on further trips. But yeah.

And I guess there were other pretty competitive volunteers. Were there any British team types around?

Yeah. There were people on the team at the same time as me who had been on the junior team and who later went on to be on the senior team at least once. So there were people who were good orienteers.

A good crew of people to learn from.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. Since then, so you’ve been to, I don’t know how many WOCs, do you know off the top of your head?

Alison Crocker: Yeah, not really.

Okay, I looked it up, nine World Orienteering Championships. But you’ve been trying to balance racing with a career in academia, and now a family. How do you choose how much time you can put into things, and prioritize?

Super busy. Yeah, it’s very busy and I think part of the academic career that worked well–less well for ski orienteering–but my summers are more of my own time. I do research with students but I can kind of escape and go to different meets and go to WOC without it being a problem. So that’s one good feature. But during the school year, it’s really hard to find the time to train. It’s even harder now with kids that I can’t just like…if I go running during the day, I can’t just make it up by doing some work at night because there’s all these things I have to do with the kids. So I don’t know. It’s hard.

You earned a personal spot at the North Americans by winning the long and the middle, right? And you’re running all three events at WOC  this year. Is this going to be your last world champs?

That’s my plan. I think I’m in good shape this year.

Ali at the 2025 US Team Trials. Photo by Evalin Brautigam.

I did a lot of training with a local cross country team throughout the fall and winter. I found that it is fun in cross country to start being a master’s athlete and compete against people my own age. And I think that I’d also have more fun now in orienteering if I start going to master’s world champs and things. So, I think even in the future if I did earn a personal spot, I probably wouldn’t go just because I think for me it’s the time to go do different things.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I’m glad that you’re not in my masters category. 

Looking back at WOC, you have had some very good finishes over the years. Do any stand out to you that you’re particularly proud of?

Totally. Yeah, the one I’m really proud of–I think my best sprint placing was a little higher–but my long in Finland, I think it was 18th. Is that right?

Yes, that’s right.

And I think that’s probably the single race I’m most proud of. I raced really hard, kept the navigation together, and in particular, there was a route choice that I made that was kind of right, at least for me, which was a long runaround leg, and I remember doing it and just being like, I hope this is right. But–and I think the analysis shows that it was a smart choice, at least if you were a fast runner. And so yeah, I’m really proud of that race and it was fun to be there and running fast through the woods and finding things where I wanted mostly.

Ali’s route at the 2013 WOC Long. You can see her gutsy choice to run wide left from 10 to 11. Click on the image to see all the GPS tracking from that event.

And you get to go back to Finland this year, though it’s different.

Yes, I think it will be different terrain. But back to Finland this year.

You can channel that good feeling and result.

Is the sprint in Switzerland what you were thinking of, which was a 20th place, is that right? I remember the sprint in Switzerland because it was really technical and it was really tricky and you still were right up there.

And I think that one I was also finishing with [many-time WOC champion] Simone [Niggli] and got hit on the head with Swiss flags.

That’s a memory.

What about Scotland? Did Scotland have a sprint? I feel like that was …

So, yeah, 15th in the sprint in Scotland.

And it was still a sprint but it was mostly parky. And so it helped being able to run fast, keep my head straight, but it wasn’t as dense as an old European city that I find really hard to train for in the US. It’s just such a different type of orienteering.

Of all of your travels for orienteering, including WOCs  and whatever else you’ve done, what are the favorite places you’ve been?

Partly Finland because I raced well there and liked it.

You have good memories.

I mean some of my most memorable orienteering is really places I just would never ever have gone. So the ski orienteering in Kazakhstan, that was something I will always always remember.

Because it’s not a place… I even talked to my colleagues in the Russian department here and they’re like, “you were in the middle of nowhere,” and I was like yes we really were. So that was super cool.

Ali skiing at the SkiO World Champs in Kazahkstan.

That was a trip. And we didn’t talk about ski WOCs, but your best finishes, placing-wise, are from ski WOC. You have an eighth in the long, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, but I guess the depth of competition makes the WOC ones probably feel more…

And they’re more recent so I can remember apparently.

Yeah. 2011, eighth in the relay as well at Ski WOC. [Editor’s note: this was despite the interviewer’s inclusion on the team, not because of it.]

Ali (center) with relay teammates Cristina Luis (left) and Alex Jospe (right) at the 2011 World SkiO Championships.

But yeah, I mean I totally love skiing. The only reason I haven’t done it [Ski WOC] recently is I can’t get away from teaching at that time of year. So that’s just a bummer. 

Another memory I have, which was just really cool because it intercepted life and orienteering, was still when I was at Oxford. I was still a very very new orienteer. But I had an observing trip to a telescope in Japan. And Boris asked Rob Plowight, who is an Australian living in Japan and coaching their team and mapping there, if I could get some maps of places near the observatory. And I got hooked up with these maps and just took the train from the observatory and went to this forest in Japan and ran around on a map.

And it just felt so powerful to be able to run around in the forest, where I was on this map. I can’t even read a street sign, but I can navigate using a map in this totally foreign country. And so I remember that being just a super cool experience.

Yeah. That is cool because without orienteering you wouldn’t have done anything like that.

Nope.

Probably would have just gone wherever the tourists were recommended to go instead. 

Yep.

You’re a physics professor at Reed. Do you find that your physics background and that way of thinking is connected to liking orienteering?

I mean, I think there is and I didn’t believe… actually orienteering taught me that there probably are just different types of brains that kind of like this sort of thing. When I discovered orienteering in Oxford,  everyone was doing STEM-y type things, like everyone right. And that’s kind of rung true as I stay in the orienteering world, it’s basically everyone is in really sort of quite logical or science or math types fields, so I definitely think there’s an overlap between the brains that find physics fun and the brains that find orienteering fun. And I have such a brain that’s why I find both things really fun.

What do you think made the biggest difference in improving your orienteering?

I mean it was really a series of steps, from having friendly terrain at the beginning, so it was encouraging and not discouraging to start, and then having training camps that kept pushing my boundaries of orienteering. And then my orienteering really improved in leaps and bounds when I moved back to the US and lived in western Massachusetts and had the gang of five, Peter and Gail Gagarin, Phil Bricker, and me and Alex [Jospe].

The five of us just pushed each other and set up trainings and just got a lot of and just were encouraging and kept orienteering in the forefront of what we were doing. and so that was really helpful. And then also Western Mass is awesome because while there’s a good set of maps just around there in town that you can train on, you can also go to UNO meets, you can go to NEOC meets, you can go to Central New York meets, you can go to HVO meets, you can go to Western Connecticut meets. So you have a menu of awesome meets you can orienteer a ton every single weekend.

Mhm.

And it’s not five hour trips, it’s two hour trips at most. So yeah, orienteered a lot from Western Mass and definitely improved a lot.

So just doing a lot of orienteering and having other people around to help push and talk about things. And for most people that doesn’t happen after moving from Europe to the US…

Mhm. Yeah.

…but for you, I mean England is different than Scandinavia, but for you I guess the Western Mass-ers was the key element part of that probably.

True.  Yeah. 

The last thing I want to ask you is, what advice do you have for American orienteers who are aspiring to compete internationally? What should these young orienters who are hopefully reading this do? They can’t all go join the US junior cross-country ski team, right? But there’s probably things they can do even so.

Totally. And I think it really breaks down into the two categories of sort of the pure physical, working on running through terrain, if you can. The more cross country, the more mountain trail running probably the better. But really working on the physical running speed side of it. And then working on the technique side, which is dependent on where you are. I think the running side, there’s going to be runners everywhere, right? There’s cross country. You can figure that out. But the technique side can really be hard depending on where in the states you live, and how many maps you have available and how active the club you have around you.

I mean I think my experience with the Gang of Five in western Massachusetts is it doesn’t take much to be a critical mass of people…

Mhm. Right.

…who are interested and can set trainings for each other and make a go of whatever few maps they have around locally. So if a junior can even find a few other local people or even network with people who can at least set the training and then one or two local people who can  flag and just make trainings happen for each other, that can really really help.

Yeah. Is Portland a place where people could do that? Do you think there are enough people around Portland?

Yeah. And it goes out of just how much effort people are able to put into it. …

So one more thing. With your busy life, what does your training plan look like between now WOC?

I mean, it mostly looks like trying to do as much good running training and aiming at the more traily off-roady hilly type stuff. Even Finland’s not going to be crazy hilly, so I’m not running up like ski slopes like I was for Switzerland. But still just the off-road nature is more demanding. And then trying to get to as much orienteering as I can. Still TBD if I get to one of the East Coast meets. But I know that that would be good. And then going to the meets that both my club and Cascade are hosting that seem like I can get there and would be helpful. I’ll probably run the men’s categories if there’s longer races…

If there’s a blue, you’ll run it. Yeah, that makes sense. I will most likely be watching WOC from some other country when you compete  this summer, but I’m looking forward to seeing what this last WOC looks like for you.

I am too. It’ll be fun.

Thank you, Ali! And good luck at WOC!

February OUSA Member Spotlight: Eric Bone

On the left, Eric running the WOC 2012 Long Qualifier (photo courtesy World of O).

This is a transcript of an interview with Eric in February, 2025. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Cristina Luis: All right, Eric, tell me your orienteering origin story.

Eric Bone: My origin story starts in high school, my sophomore year. I was sitting in Spanish class next to one of my track and cross country teammates. She had a flyer from a teacher at the school who’s involved in Cascade Orienteering Club (COC) and decided he was going to try to recruit cross country team members for the Washington Interscholastic Orienteering League (WIOL). I leaned over and was like, “what’s that?” And she’s like, “yeah, I’m not interested in this.” And she showed me the flyer and I was like, “Okay, cool. This looks like a lot of fun.” And so I’m going to go to this lunchtime meeting in my freshman biology teacher’s classroom. He had brochures and maps and stuff like that and kind of just talked a little bit about what orienteering was about.

I thought, “This sounds cool.”  I brought home a brochure and showed my mom and my brother and said, “let’s do this.”

And so we went to the practice event that Saturday which was in a local park on Mercer Island, near Seattle. We were hooked. We liked it and just kept at it from there. So the school league was my start, and both my brother and I were in the league that first year. And then the next season we kind of got a bunch of our friends from the cross country team and the chess team and other friends of ours to join the Garfield High School orienteering team and we had I think 20-25 people or so. We were pretty good salespeople.

Yeah, it sounds like it. And so then obviously you took it far, you’re still on the US team. You must currently be by far the longest tenured member of the team.

Yeah. Possibly of the people on the team now. I think 1994 was my first year on the team.

So that’s pretty quick really from when you started orienteering.

Yeah. I mean, I took it quite seriously from the beginning. I quickly decided it was the sport I wanted to focus on and just worked pretty diligently at it.

So basically from the beginning you were just like, “this is it, I’m going to do this and I’m going to do it well?”

I mean, I guess I’m naturally a competitive person. And it’s not even competitiveness exactly. It’s more like I like to apply myself to whatever I’m doing, it’s more just like I’m a rule follower. I’ve always been a bad student, but I’ve wanted to be a good student. I’ve wanted to pay attention. I wanted to learn things… 

If you’re going to do it, you’re going to do it well.

I think it was easy for me to do that with orienteering because it gave me so much I just loved. It wasn’t even–some people say they love maps. For me, that wasn’t it. It was running around outside, it was just super exciting. And discovering new places.

So I think that was more because I was a runner before I was an orienteer, and I was more just drawn to the adventure aspect of it, just running around and jumping over things and challenging myself.

I mean orientering is always a challenge, it never stops being challenging…

Right. Right.

…because there’s always something new every time you turn the map over. It could be even if it’s the same venue, it’s a different course. I think that that kept me coming back. .

You talk about going to new places and adventures. What are your favorite places that you have traveled to because of orienteering? 

Yeah. I mean, that’s a hard one because I’ve been to so many places and I can’t even bring them all to mind. You know what I mean? There’s places that would be on candidates for my favorite that I’m not even thinking of right now. But I think the thing like among the WOCs that I’ve been to, I mean that’s an easy one. I just felt like Ukraine was an excellent WOC. because it was just so amazing to be in Kiev. And so that I just look back fondly upon that experience, in particular among the WOCs that I’ve been to. [Photo of Eric competing at WOC 2007, courtesy WOC 2007 photographers.]

There have been so many good times and so many wonderful experiences, visiting new places, but that’s the one that really sticks out because it’s different enough to be a really interesting place to go because of the Eastern Orthodox religion and the history. And I mean, it was just amazing in Kiev, I mean, of course, being the capital, I mean, it was just a great experience. Often when you’re orienteering, you’re off in some little dusty corner of the country. 

Right.

So being in this big city with all this history and culture and the infrastructure to explore and really enjoy it was a great experience.

So of all of these orientating experiences you’ve had, which one or ones are you most proud of? 

Boy, it’s so hard to pick something because I’ve had many runs over the years that have been really satisfying. I think I do really like the times that I’ve had a great performance and possibly won or placed. The first thing that pops into my head is winning four intercollegiate titles. That was something that was very meaningful to me at the time because I was really trying to get more consistent. At that time in my orienteering I was still making a lot of mistakes and so to be able to pull that out was not a given at all.

Those are individual varsity titles?

Individual titles, yeah. And we did, I think, win the team title as a University of Washington team a couple times if I remember right, but I’m not 100% sure about that. But the four in a row individual titles…

That’s some domination.

…it was like, “okay cool, I’m a legit orienteer, I can win things.” So that was a good experience for sure in terms of really being a confidence builder and feeling like I’d accomplished something as an athlete.

Just because of where I was at in my career, I still feel a lot of satisfaction about the North Americans in 2012 in Pennsylvania. I had a quite good run in the middle and I don’t think I won the race outright, but I think I was second overall or something like that. But I was the North American champ because the winner was Lacho Iliev from Bulgaria.

M21 Middle distance course at NAOC 2012 (from DVOA Route Gadget)

Yeah. That’s right.

So that’s another one that comes to mind. But the thing that I like is just finishing a race, whether I win or don’t win, and just knowing that I really had a really good run and just got into that state of feeling like I’m moving well. I’m really concentrated, I’m hitting things.

Even now that could happen for me and I would feel very satisfied with it but I wouldn’t be winning, just because my speed is not what it once was.

Right. I remember that you’ve always had a pretty analytical approach to how you did post race analysis. Do you still do that? 

I mean honestly nowadays it’s very impressionistic, I think there’s a time for different approaches in one’s development. I think there was a time when I would go through each leg and I would analyze it in great detail. I’d draw my route and I’d say, “I hesitated here.”

Okay, what was that about? I didn’t have a plan or I didn’t look. So, I’d be kind of dissecting things in minute detail and diagnosing things that lost 5 seconds or something. I’m not doing that so much anymore. Once in a while maybe I’ll go through a course with that level of scrutiny, but now it’s more broad brush, just kind of recognizing the patterns and saying , “okay, today I needed to work on X,” or “I wasn’t prepared in this way,” or something like that and then trying to do a little better next time.

So it’s pretty high level now I think versus the granularity that I used to approach things with.

And do you think that granularity is what helped make you good and consistently good?

I think it was part of it. I mean, I think you have to know how you have to be able to find patterns in your performance that are going to reveal areas for improvement or areas to focus on. And sometimes improvement just means having the right idea in your head when you start a race, it doesn’t necessarily mean, I went and practiced a skill a bunch of times.

It could mean that, but it might just mean going in with the right sort of prompts in your head, “today I’m going to compass” or attackpoints, or whatever the thing is that you need to think about to optimize how you’re running that day. I’ve always just been very interested in the mental game with orienteering, for a long time. I mean a lot of sports are very mental, especially when you’re trying to get to a high level, but I think especially with orienteering because you have both the running component and the technical component. And then the technical component can be subdivided into all these skill areas. And it’s different in different terrains. The interplay of performing the skill and your mental attitude that gets you ready to do that performance becomes very important. What kind of brain do you have on your shoulders when you’re at that start line? And is that the brain you need to do the things you need to do to be successful that day?

Cultivating the right mindset and of course the right physical preparation is very important too. if you feel horrible then it’s harder to focus on navigating.

Eric’s annotated map from WOC 1997 classic (long) qualifer. Eric says that during this time he was, “having a dissociative episode that made the orienteering extra challenging, so I wasn’t racing at my best.” Reading the notes on the bottom left you can see that he refers to this as being in a “peculiar, daydreaming state of mind.”

You mentioned “the brain you have on your shoulders when you’re at the start line”. So I have to ask you now–you’re sort of notorious for arriving at the start with zero extra time. And in fact the first year that I went to WOC as a team official my job was to make sure you got to the start on time. 

So you were the Eric Wrangler.

And I don’t know that I actually had any control over that. But at the time you told me that that’s part of how you like to be mentally prepared. What are you doing?

Remind me which WOC was that?

That was Denmark in 2006.

2006. Yeah. But did I make it to the start on time?

Yeah. I think you made it not necessarily on time, but before the next call up.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, on time enough.

Yeah. You ran up with your shoelaces untied. You said something about just needing to have things to do. You got there basically on time but you still had things you had to do. 

Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, that’s par for the course.

Eric prepping for a training session at WOC 2009 (Cristina Luis)

So that’s on purpose.

I don’t know if it’s on purpose. I mean, I think it’s not exactly on purpose. I mean, I’ve had good runs when I’ve been late, missed my start. I’ve had good runs when I’ve been on time for my start or even a few minutes early. So, I think that’s not necessarily a strategic component of my preparation. I’d say more just has to do with the way I function. What I will say is that sometimes what I find is that if I’m just going through the motions and I’m just very mechanical about, “okay, what do I need to do to get myself to the start at X time?” Sometimes that kind of mentality can leave me underexcited or something or not ‘stoked’ enough or not dialed in enough mentally because it’s like a different track. Almost like–I don’t know how to explain it but I think there’s a timer in my head. There’s a level of work that goes into getting ready and getting to the start and I think there’s part of my brain that’s a little bit sleepy and a little bit kind of underactivated, and so there’s a ramp up to go from that state of activation to a high level of activation where you need to be for performing well and orienteering. So it’s possible, and I wouldn’t put money on this but, not that there’s any way to find out for sure, but it’s possible that there’s a sense in which having a little bit of urgency helps get to that higher level of mental activation. 

I was going to say a sense of urgency.

Yeah. Yeah.

It’s just not there until you make it.

So once there’s no leeway in the schedule, once it’s, “okay, I really have to go to make it to the start,” then I think it’s easier to crank up the level of mental activation.

Right. That makes sense.

Sort of nervous arousal or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. And there’s an optimal level for different people, I think for me it’s pretty high. And that’s also why I’ve done well in big races, because if you’re someone whose optimal level is lower, then when you get on a really big stage it’s going to be too much.

I think because I’m a little more type B, I guess, or something, that enables me to thrive on a higher level of nervousness. Or at least operate. I don’t know about thrive, but certainly function, versus shutting down or making silly mistakes.

Right, yeah, I mean I definitely experienced that, where it is too much. And that I never find the first control or…

Totally. Yeah. And I’ve experienced that too. I’m not immune to that either by any means.

I find that there’s a certain amount of stress that definitely enhances the focus. If I see somebody else, that helps me focus more, right, that there’s another person there. And so, for some people, it’s too much of a distraction.

Yeah. Right.

Like you said, everyone is different. Do you think people learn to perform better in bigger events because the stress level goes down or because they’ve learned to function with the higher stress?

I think it’s usually the former, but it’s possible that you can also just adapt and learn to cope with higher stress. But what I thought I heard from the sports psychologists that I’ve heard talk about this is that for most people it’s an innate setting to some degree. And so it’s more like your approach is more how to take pressure off if that’s what you need or how to dial up the pressure if that’s what you need.

I was just listening to an interview with a sports coach yesterday, actually, where he talked about helping athletes be less focused on the result and be more in the moment. And that is definitely one of the things that can change the level of stress when you are on the start line of a world champs race. If you’re focused on the process then that can help bring the level of stress down to where you won’t just blow up the first control.

Yeah. And you see that when you’re watching an athlete in a field event in the Olympics and they have their little routine that they do that cues them. They’re creating a kind of a sameness of the conditions. So, they’re like, “I know how to perform under these conditions.”

So their little movements and stuff kind of cue them into that very cultivated situation.

Right, and it brings them into, “I’ve done this before. I’m just doing the same thing. It doesn’t matter that there are 20,000 people watching me.”

Exactly. Yep. It just becomes rote.

It’s exactly the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that reminds me, I remember you would say–and I found this to be really comforting–that, “today is a great day because today we get to go orienteering.”

Eric doing some tourist orienteering in Vienna prior to WOC 2008. (Cristina Luis)

Exactly.

And I don’t know if you still say that, but I feel like that’s a great way to help bring it down for some people, it’s just saying, “I know how to do this.” Anyone who’s showing up at the World Champs has done this [orienteering] hundreds of times. More people are paying attention to these results, but it’s the same sport and you’ve done it before.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I don’t actually say that a lot, I say that occasionally, but that’s my attitude,…

I think that I liked it so much that when I heard you say it, maybe only once or twice that you said it, but you said it in such a prime moment, people are eating breakfast and they’re silent because they’re stressed or we’re getting ready to go and you’re just like, “It’s a great day. We get to go orienteering.” That’s just a great attitude.

Speaking of high performance events, you are on the National Team again. Are you going to be at the Team Trials?

I will be there.

Right. Gunning for a spot in Finland.

I’m gunning for a spot. I am not holding my breath for one, but to me it’s always fun to have the most competition that I can get.

Yep.

So to me I want to go to the team trials because that’s where it’s at. I want to go to races where other team members are there. So really for me I mean it’s still fun, if it stops being fun, I won’t be there anymore. But as long as it’s fun to me, that’s what it’s about. It’s like if I’m like, hey, this is the funnest thing I can do right now, that’s cool, I want to keep doing it.

Yeah. I signed up for the trials age group…

Yeah. Awesome.

Because yeah, it’s fun to test yourself against the fast kids.

Totally. Absolutely. Yeah.

You talked about how you love being outside and adventures and that’s what you do for work too, right?

I heard somewhere–maybe it was on this meditation retreat I did or maybe it was somewhere else–but I heard, and I think this is probably true for a lot of people, that when you really enjoy something you really want to share it with other people. To me having a company where I’m putting on outdoor events is just…I don’t know, I just feel so lucky to be doing this job, and that’s the work I do. I put on trail running races. I put on urban and wilderness navigation events, short rogaines. Mostly short, sometimes we do 24-hour ones, but those are more work, so fewer and farther between. But yeah, I just think it’s just fun to be able to support a community around those events and give people more options of stuff to do because I just know I’m just trying to put myself in other people’s shoes and say I know how much I appreciate all the rich offering of events that are out there. Including the ones you’re working on. Thank you for that. But, there’s so many great events out there and it’s just such a treat to be able to do. So, that’s kind of why I think I’m doing what I’m doing rather than quitting and getting a minimum wage job and probably on an average year making more money at it. Or at least as much.

I think that what you said about when you really enjoy something, you really want to share it with other people definitely resonates.

Winding down here, I want to know if you have tips for the younger orienteers out there who want to be the next Eric Bone, by which I mean they want to be successful and have longevity.

I think a lot of that comes down to doing what you enjoy. If you enjoy orienteering and you keep the focus on that enjoyment and you enjoy applying yourself and trying to be good at something, if you have that combination of traits, then that’s all you need, you just keep the focus on that. I think a lot of people, including myself, who orienteer are discerning and are very good at noticing differences and deviations and deficits in particular. So I think it’s easy to get into a mindset of focusing too much on the negative things.

I think for longevity and also for skill you need to be able to balance that out. I don’t want to just have a bad race and then have only negative takeaways from it. No matter how bad or how good your race is you can always have a balanced perspective. There’s always things that could have been better–maybe you just had a fantastic race and maybe that’s the time to just be like, “yes this was awesome!” But most of the time there’s always something you could have done better. There’s always something that was good about it. And even if you didn’t do anything right, you were out in nature, you were having fun, you were doing something that’s good for you, that you enjoy. So, I think for me that’s the game right there.

It’s doing something that you really love and that provides all the motivation you need, just the fact that it’s such a fantastic thing and then you have the right attitude toward it, which you can cultivate. I mean, it’s all about how you think about it and it’s all about mental practices, about purposely being balanced. Let’s say you’re someone who works with a coach, and maybe your friend tells you, “Gosh, you’re always complaining, you’re always saying, ‘I had a bad run,’ even when you’re placing really well, or whatever. Maybe it’s time to make a practice of finding something good to think about, too. I don’t know. That would be my advice. But as with most free advice, it’s take it or leave it. It’s worth every penny you paid for it.

It’s interesting that you went for the mental side, the attitude, as opposed to “do more cross training” or “take more rest days”, or whatever. Earlier, you talked about the change in how you analyze races and whatnot, and the big theme seems to be the mental side, the attitude.

Yeah. All of those things are important, too. And it’s situation dependent, that’s going to vary person to person, but I think the most general advice I can give is the advice about just enjoy it, enjoy it and cultivate the approach that you’re there to have fun, and that you enjoy it. And if you enjoy competing, great.

If you don’t enjoy competing, then don’t worry about how well you do. Just enjoy the experience. So, yeah, you just have to make it work for you.

That seems like very good advice, not just for orienteering but for many things in life, right?

Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. I mean, I’m not good at many other things, so I couldn’t say for sure, but right.

Okay, I need to congratulate you on somewhat recently becoming a father, right?

Quite recently in terms of the history of my life. Yeah, I became a father in April of this past year.

I guess it’s a small percentage of your lifespan.

Yeah. So, we’ve got a nine and a half month old now, his name’s Andrew and he likes the outdoors. He has not been on a course yet. He has been to an orienteering event just to meet people and hang out. He enjoys people. So he was happy about that. He was happy to meet some more folks and he’s a social guy and so he enjoyed it.

And soon he’ll like beeping…

Yeah, hopefully. I mean, we’ll see. I’m just prepared for him to hate orienteering and for him to do something else…

Right? But every kid likes the beeping…

At least we’re going to do some beeps, I think, one of these days. So, yeah, we’re going to do some beeps, for sure.

And I mean, he’ll definitely be doing some more cheering in the backpack before too long here. We just haven’t really gotten around to taking him around a course yet in the backpack. But I don’t think It wouldn’t mean anything to him at this point. Pretty soon he’s starting to have opinions about things and he’s starting to be more perceptive… 

For sure! Eric, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

I’ve enjoyed it. Yeah, Thanks for choosing to do a profile on me. 

The Lookback: 1979 World Orienteering Championships

US Team for the 1979 World Orienteering Championships in Tampere, Finland. From left to right: Pat Dunleavy, Peter Gagarin, Steve Tarry, Linda Taylor, Jim Pugh, Virginia Lehman, Mikell Platt, Sharon Crawford, Eric Weyman, Beth Skelton, Betty Anderson, Gail Gagarin.

Shortly after sending out the December, 2024 OUSA Newsletter I received an email from Jim Pugh with the 1979 WOC team photo you see above, and the suggestion to include it in an upcoming newsletter. This seemed like a great idea. With a few more photos from Jim, plus some stories and maps from Peter Gagarin, this little look back into the past was born. Enjoy this peak into the US team’s past!

–Cristina

Map of the Individual courses for WOC 1979, annotated with routes for the top men and women.

Some memories from Peter Gagarin from the World Orienteering Championships in Tampere, Finland, in 1979 –

The team was selected at Team Trials in May at Quabbin (days 1 and 3) and Mount Hermon School (day 2) in Massachusetts. Women: Sharon Crawford, Beth Skelton, Betty Andersen, Linda Taylor, Virginia Lehman. Men: Eric Weyman, Mikell Platt, Steve Tarry, Jim Pugh, Peter Gagarin. Many of us lived in the Northeast and we got together on several weekends for training before heading to Finland in late August.

It was really hard orienteering. The forests were hilly with lots of thick vegetation; the ground was very soft and hard to run on. There were just two events, individual and relay, with the maps for both drawn at 1:20,000. And yet we had some excellent results, especially from our women. Sharon Crawford was 32nd out of 69 in the individual, certainly one of our best results ever, and the women finished 10th out 17 in the relay, which I think is our best ever. Eric Weyman was our best in the men’s individual, 53rd of 78, and the men finished 14th out of 19 in the relay. [Link to results on the IOF webpage.]

The women’s relay team was really something. Beth Skelton ran the opening leg, a good run for her, and then Sharon on the second leg had her usual good run. Third leg went to Betty Andersen, though that was in doubt until the last moment – she had taken a fall in the individual, landing on a stump someplace on her ribs, and was really hurting. But she wanted to run. I put her through some sort of test that morning to see if she really could run and she passed, and so when Sharon came in, off went Betty on the anchor leg.

There was no GPS in those days, no TV from the forest. I think there were a couple of radio controls, but at the finish you just wait, as the better teams keep coming in. And then there she was, 10th, first of the English-speaking countries, ahead of Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain, plus France and Poland for good measure. It was really amazing.

I ran just the relay, first leg, not perfect but a good run. It was raining. My map case wasn’t sealed, and the map got wet, and the ink for the courses wasn’t waterproof and it started to run, but it held up just well enough to tell where my controls were. The ink kept running for quite a while after I had stopped running, so it looks almost impossible to read now. It wasn’t that bad.

Map from the men’s relay at the 1979 World Orienteering Championships.

The map for the individual shows the routes of the medalists and my map for the relay is shown. Also, just for comparison, the next map I went orienteering on back home, Estabrook Woods in Concord, Mass. Quite the difference.

Map from a local event at Estabrook Woods in Concord, MA later the same month as WOC.

Clinton Morse

Photo by Nadim Ahmed

Orienteering USA is deeply saddened to announce the sudden passing of Clinton Morse, National Communications Manager, on July 12, 2024. He suffered a fatal heart attack after his morning run. Clinton was 62 years old. His untimely loss leaves a big gap in our hearts, and will be felt throughout the orienteering community. We offer our deepest condolences to his wife Ellen, his children Anna, Hayden, and Jackson, as well as to his extended family and friends.  

He was a wonderful human being who also did a great deal of OUSA publicity, including the monthly newsletter, Year In Review, social media posts, and anything else he was asked. Clinton is most famous as the guy with the camera who was running around like a maniac near the O-meet finish line to take your photo.  You couldn’t breathe, but suddenly you wanted to try to look good in the shot. He had a gift for highlighting our best orienteering selves, whether that was in words or in images.

Clint was a graduate of Cornell, and most of his career was in horticulture.  He was the manager of the greenhouse and botanical collections at the University of Connecticut until his retirement in 2020.  Besides his official OUSA role, Clinton was an enthusiastic orienteer, trail runner, and Rogainer, and was a mapper as well as a frequent course setter. Most recently, he single-handedly produced the Team Trials for the US World Orienteering Championship team at UConn, from maps to courses to results.

Photo by Nadim Ahmed