Daily thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Daily thoughts about orienteering |
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008 Grading trainingSunday, I did a 70 minute training run. I carried a map and kept track of my progress. I ran on trails with a few hills.Yesterday, I worked late and didn't do any training. Today, I did a short trail run with some intervals. I ran on flat trails. I would have run more, but I needed to get home and mow the lawn. While I was mowing, I decided it'd be nice to be able to "grade" each run and then add up the grades on a weekly (or monthly) basis to get some measure of how well I'd trained. What I had in mind was a simple system. I'd count up points based on the training. I haven't thought through this very carefully, but maybe I'd give myself 3 points if I ran in O' relevant terrain and 1 point for each 30 minutes of running and some points for running hard (or easy when rest was called for) and so on. Maybe it is a completely flaky idea (I've had a lot of those). I'll give it some more thought and see what I come up with. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 9:01 PM 
Monday, May 19, 2008 Peering into the future?I spent some time this weekend reading about lidar. People are developing computer programs that do much more than just create contours. They've got programs that analyze the raw data and characterize it. In other words, the software looks at the data and decides if it is a road or a building or a forest. I don't know how well these programs work. I suspect they are so-so. You wouldn't completely trust the characterizations.As I was running in the forest on Sunday, I started wondering if someone could write a program to make an educated guess about the runnability of forested areas. In this part of the country, it is very difficult to consistently map the different shades of green. Having a computer program taking a first crack at it would be useful. I also came across an experiment with using lidar to create 3d models of city buildings that can then be used in Google Earth. Cool. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 8:59 PM
Sunday, May 18, 2008 Looking at Canadian sprint resultsLast night I took a quick look at the results from the Canadian WOC selection races in Ottawa. I was a bit surprised to see that Patrick Goeres' result in the sprint. Not that he won, but that he won a 12 minute race by over a minute.1. Patrick Goeres 12:06 2. Mike Smith 13:09 Patrick won 11 of 17 legs. Patrick ran the first leg in 39 seconds. Mike ran it in 51. Only one other person was under 50 seconds. It makes me think that either (a) Patrick is just that much faster than any of the others and/or (b) he's figured out something about sprint orienteering that the rest haven't and/or (c) he got a bit lucky. I was curious to see the course...and today, I found it. Brent posted it and I lifted it.  The course looks reasonable. Lots of direction changes and several places where it'd be easy to skip a control or go to the wrong control. I was a bit surprised that they ran on a regular map rather than a map field checked under the sprint standards. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 4:08 PM
Saturday, May 17, 2008 Summer vegetationI took a short run on the bike trails at Clinton State Park today. The summer vegetation is out. You can't see much more than 15 meters into the forest in any direction. It is disorienting.Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 8:11 PM
Thursday, May 15, 2008 Nomeland on his leg at Tio MilaArild Nomeland ran the 2nd leg at Tio Mila for Kristiansand OK's winning team and wrote about it at the KOK elite blog.Here is a rough translation of a bit of what he wrote: I was with a pack of 6-7 teams on the way to the start triangle. I decided to run the left route choice on trails in order to get a safe and good start. None of the teams around me went that way. I have to say that my pulse went up a bit when I didn't see any headlamps either ahead or behind me. I tried to push hard without getting too much lactic acid. On the way into the first control I saw a lot of the known teams and know that I'd had a good start.  If you can read Norwegian, the original article is worth a look. If you can't, you can check out the Google Translate version. It isn't perfect (and some of the translation is a bit strange) but you'll get the idea. My New Toy I picked up a Radio Shack Infrared Thermometer yesterday. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I can tell you that the glass of Smithwicks sitting next to the keyboard is at 51.5 degrees and tastes good. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 9:07 PM
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Another look at some terrain using lidarI spent a bit more time playing with lidar data. This image is pretty interesting. You can see the stream and ditch beds. The scale, by the way, was inadvertently cut off. Each tick mark on the bar scale is 50 meters. One of the more interesting features that shows up in the DEM is a line that runs straight east-west across the lower part of the image. That line is an old stone wall. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 9:16 PM
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Everest climb documentaryInstead of writing something, I spent most of the evening glued to the TV watching a PBS documentary about climbing Everest (You can apparently watch the entire program online at the link).Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 9:47 PM
Monday, May 12, 2008 Ice vestsI spent some time this weekend in front of the TV watching the Giro d'Italia bike race. The Slipstream-Chippotle team won the team time trial. According to an article in Velonews, part of the secret was warming up with ice vests.Then Lim pulled out his secret weapon: white vests filled with ice that riders donned to keep their core temperature low and allow the legs to warm up without overcooking their body temperature. “We warmed up with ice vests, which are not fun to warm up with,” Vande Velde said. If I had to orienteer in hot weather and I had more money than I knew what to do with, then I'd buy myself an ice vest. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 8:39 PM
Saturday, May 10, 2008 A Swedish comparison of lidar and O' mapsA comparison of a lidar basemap and an orienteering map from Sweden: The image is from Erik Zander's paper on lidar as a method for producing orienteering maps. The paper is in Swedish, but has some nice graphics that compare the data he got from lidar to an orienteering map of the same area. Here is the PDF file. Reading Zander's paper inspired me to play around with some local lidar data. I've been using a free program called Quickgrid to produce contour maps which can be exported and used in OCAD. I also installed a demo version of Global Mapper which seems to have a few more features than Quickgrid (and let me open some lidar data that I can't open in Quickgrid). With Global Mapper I was able to easily view some of the shaded relief lidar data. These files showed a reasonable amount of detail - like ditches and roads - that aren't necessarily visible in the contours alone. I'll keep experimenting...but, now I've got to go do some organizing around the house (and packing). Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 12:15 PM
Friday, May 09, 2008 Urban Basketball?I came across this map today: It is from "Urb-O", which seems to be a way to begin to introduce kids to orienteering. You can see a short video. I also came across a Norwegian newspaper story about the event. Since Google Translate just added Swedish and Norwegian, it seemed like a good opportunity for a test. Here is a bit of the article translated by Google: Urb-o stands for Urban Basketball, and is a newly-established offerings for children and young people in Sandviken. Every Thursday, anyone who wants to be with and run - with or without a map. Basketball? Google translated "orientering" to "basketball." Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 6:46 PM
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