Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Sunday, June 09, 2002 Look UpMost of us need to work on keeping our heads up when we orienteer. Look around. Look far ahead in the terrain.At TJOC I watched a lot of people orienteer, and one thing that stood out was that orienteers don't look around enough. A lot of us are either looking at the map, the ground or the 10-20 meters of forest directly in front of us. When I was manning controls I saw people run within 20 meters of a control without seeing it. They weren't looking up and around. If they'd just looked around, they'd have saved time. When I'm orienteering well, I look far ahead. When I'm not orienteering well, I often catch myself looking at the ground. How can you train yourself to look ahead? One thing that would help is to plan to look up and look around. Make it part of your strategy. Just before starting, remind yourself to keep your head up. You could practice by re-running a course and seeing how far ahead you could see things if you were really looking. I bet if you walked around a course and kept looking as far ahead as possible, you'd find that you could see terrain features and controls sooner than you did during the race. I suspect that it is harder to look ahead and look around when you are really tired (most navigation gets tough when you're tired). When my legs are dead and I'm struggling at the end of a course, I catch myself looking at the ground right in front of me. Being fitter ought to make it easier to keep your head up. Fritz could probably invent some sort of training aid -- maybe a sharp needle that would fit on the bottom of your chin and would poke you if you didn't keep your head up! posted by Michael | 8:31 PM 
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