okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Sunday, December 22, 2002
Map study
I read that Michael Vick (an NFL quarterback) spends 90 minutes a day watching video tapes of football games, studying upcoming opponents and analyzing past games. It is a bit like an orienteer doing map study.
Thinking about Vick's video study made me wonder -- how much time do orienteers devote to studying maps? How much time should you devote to studying maps? Is it worth spending much time studying maps?
I know a fair amount about how top orienteers train. I've read books and articles and studied training diaries. But, I know almost nothing about how much time top orienteers spend studying maps.
Kent Olsson talked about spending a lot of time studying maps during the month or two leading up to a world champs. But, he never said what he meant by a lot of time.
Bjornar Valstad and Hanne Staff are collecting courses on the map that will be used for this summer's long course at the world champs. Presumably, they'll study the maps and courses to prepare themselves.
90 minutes a day would seem to be a lot of time to spend looking at maps. A few minutes a day would seem to be very little. Somewhere between 5 minutes and 90 minutes would probably be ideal. I'll have to give it some thought (and some experimentation) and see what seems to work.
posted by Michael |
6:03 PM
