okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Friday, April 05, 2002
Why booms happen
I bumped into an article from a Norwegian orienteering page that described why people boom controls.
The article lists three reasons (very quick/rough translations):
1. Going too fast. It is common to boom because you ran the same speed the whole way; you didn't slow down and pay more attention when you got near the control.
2. Failing to adjust your technique. If you don't adjust your technique to the specific conditions -- terrain and type of leg -- you might boom.
3. Failing to simplify the control. If you don't look for ways to simplify the control, it is easy to boom. You should always plan how you're going to find the control (often picking a good attackpoint).
The Norwegian article didn't mention the effect of getting tired on booming. If you look at a bunch of split times, you'll see that people make a lot of booms later in the course. Getting tired doesn't really cause you to boom so much as it causes you to get sloppy (to orienteer un-systematically)...and then you boom.
posted by Michael |
9:41 PM
