Ioco WJR 2-Day Why Just Run
May 30th 2026 10:00am - May 31st 2026 2:00pm
Organizers: Stan Woods (Event Director), Daniel Coombs (Assistant), Joanne Woods (Membership), Adam Woods (Assistant), Reuben Ford (Assistant), Scott Muma (Assistant), Bruce Rennie (Assistant), Alistair Howard (Coach), Robyn Rennie (Organizer), Chris Benn (Organizer), Stan Woods (Course Planner)
Come and enjoy two days of orienteering in the Ioco area. Adult entry fees are $15 per day (event). If you want to attend both days, you must register for each day. Much of the map is runnable open forested terrain, with rich contour, stream, marsh and rock features. A very enjoyable area to orienteer, a map not to be missed. The courses on Saturday May 30th will be generally shorter in distance (and time) and because they cover parts of the map with more trails and roads will be slightly less challenging from a forest orienteering perspective.
Doing the Saturday event will be good practice in reading and interpreting the Ioco map and forest terrain and improve your performance on Sunday.
Weather permitting, we are planning a potluck lunch at the Ioco site on Saturday. After you finish your course, you can drop in for lunch anytime between about 11:30am and 1:30pm. If you are registering for the Saturday Ioco event and are able to attend the potluck lunch please let us know by answering the potluck question during the registration process. We will provide more details about the potluck lunch closer to the event once we have a better idea of the weather forecast.
The courses on Sunday May 31st will be generally longer in distance (and time) than Saturday and will cover parts of the map with fewer trails and roads and hence will be more challenging from a forest orienteering perspective. To help you stay in contact with the map both the Saturday and Sunday courses will have generally more controls than you would typically see on comparable length forest courses.
Saturday May 30th schedule:
9:00 – Earliest time to enter access gate to parking lot.
9:20 – Registration opens to confirm SI number and course. Coaches available to help people on the Intermediate course.
10:00 - First starts. People with less forest orienteering experience should start early.
11:00 - Final start.
11:30 - 13:30 drop in Potluck lunch (weather permitting).
13:00 - Course closes for Everyone.
May 30 courses are all at a map scale of 1:7500 with a 5-meter contour interval. On May 30 the Expert and Elite Courses will have butterfly loops (see description below).
Courses: The two shortest courses, in order from easiest to most difficult (technical and physical) are as follows:
·Intermediate - Mostly on trails, and relatively short. A combination of controls on trails, and near trails (and hence Technical Difficulty 3). Due to the complexity of the trails, and the complexity of the terrain there is NO course offered for solo Beginners or Novices. The Intermediate course is the ‘easiest’ course and is only suitable for beginners or novices in groups of two or more. If possible, younger experienced forest orienteers should run with a partner (or be shadowed by an experienced adult). This is a good course for adults who have some orienteering experience in city parks and urban areas and know how to use a compass but are new to forest orienteering. Coaches will be available to help you understand the Intermediate map and course. Please let people at the registration table know if you want any coaching.
·Short Advanced - This course has a Technical Difficulty of 4 as it has less climb and is less physically demanding than the longer courses. This may, be a suitable course for experienced forest orienteers who want a course that challenges their technical forest orienteering skills but is shorter and less physically demanding.
For both Saturday and Sunday it is suggested that you carry water as NO-water will be provided on the course.
Sunday May 31st schedule:
9:00 – Earliest time to enter access gate to parking lot.
9:20 – Registration opens to confirm SI number and course. Coaches available to help people on the Intermediate course.
10:00 - First start. People with less forest orienteering experience should start early.
11:00 - Final start.
14:00 - Course closes for Everyone.
The 3 shorter courses on May 31 are at a map scale of 1:7500 with a 5-meter contour interval. The Elite course is at a map scale of 1:10,000 with a 5-meter contour interval.
Time Start and Start Triangle
Ioco will use a separate ‘Time Start’ located about 50 m before the ‘Start Triangle’. People waiting in the start queue will pick up their map and control descriptions (if you have a control description holder) and then the Starting Official will tell people when they can start. People will then start their time by inserting their SI stick into the SI unit labeled ‘Start’ (on a stand but with NO control flag) and run 50 meters along a flagged trail toward the ‘Start Triangle’. The ‘Start Triangle’ is shown on the map, as usual, but will have NO SI unit (a control flag on a stand but with NO SI unit).
May 30 Butterfly Loops (Expert and Elite courses)
On May 30, the butterfly loops for the Expert and Elite courses are different. Butterfly loops are a group of controls forming 2 loops with a common hub control in the middle. The 2 loops resemble the wings of a butterfly, thus the name butterfly loops. The loops are different lengths and each will take 4-15 minutes to complete. All the competitors on the same course (Expert or Elite) will complete both butterfly loops but the order will vary; half the competitors will run the right-most loop first while the other half starts with the left-most loop. Thus, for half the competitors (on the same course) the pattern looks like this (an example, not from the actual course):
while the other half sees it as this:
Note that each competitor has to punch the common (hub) control 3 times: first when you enter the butterfly, a second time when you have completed the first loop, and finally a 3rd time when you have completed the 2nd loop.
The common control will be marked with 3 numbers stacked up on your map, it will be duplicated 3 times on your control description sheet, and it will be programmed in the e-punch scoring to require 3 punches. We expect that this will be easy to forget, since it will seem like once you've found the control you shouldn't need to visit it again, but because the two wings are of different lengths, the multiple punching is a necessary requirement to balance the two variants of the butterfly. So please remember to punch the common (hub) control 3 times.