Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, December 21, 2002 Some thoughts on Line O'Eric W's comments on yesterday's post are interesting. If you haven't read them, take a look.One thing Eric wrote about was concentration and overdistance technical workouts. I'll probably write a bit about that idea sometime, but not today. Eric also wrote, "I think Line O (w or w/o controls) is the best way to make sure the map reading is focussed." In case your not familiar with it, Line O' involves having a line drawn on the map and then following that line. Eric's comment got me to thinking about line O' and inspired...five comments about line O': Line O' is a good way to train on maps you're familiar with. To follow the line you've got to look at the map and pay attention. That is true even on maps you are very familiar with. No matter how well you know the map, you don't know the line until you run it. Arja Hannus used line O'. Arja has won world championships in both orienteering and ski orienteering, so if she has any advice on training it is worth listening to. At one of the O'ringen clinics years ago, Arja told me that a lot of her training was running hilly line O' courses. Line O' works better in nicer forest than we have in the KC area. One of the problems with doing line O' around Kansas City is that it sometimes forces you to go through really crappy forest. If the line goes through an area that is crappy, you've got to either go through the area or get off the line. In the KC area we have a lot of variation in the light green forest (which dominates most of our terrain). Some of the light green is not so bad, but some is quite unpleasant. You can't always tell, until you get there, what type of light green you're getting in to. Point-to-point courses let you use small swings off the planned route to avoid crappy forest. Beaver O' is a great form of line O'. Beaver O' is a special form of line O'. You do the session as a group (at least two runners and probably not more than 4 or 5). To illustrate, lets say you're group is three runners -- Mook, Gene and Fritz. To begin with Mook has a map with a detailed line O' course. Gene and Fritz have blank maps. Mook starts and follows the line. Gene and Fritz follow Mook and keep track of where they are. One of these guys has a watch that is set to beep at an interval of, say, 4 minutes. When the watch beeps, everyone stops and quickly picks out exactly where they are. Mook, who has the map with the line, gets two beavers if he is off the line or doesn't know where he is. Gene and Fritz each get a beaver if they don't know where they are. Once they've done the scoring (which shouldn't take more than 20-30 seconds), Mook gets a blank map and Gene leads until the next alarm, and so on. Beaver O' has some advantages as a training exercise. It is fun. It requires a lot of concentration. The intensity is usually low (because the idea is to be accurate and precise, not necessarily fast). Low intensity also makes it feasible to do even if the group has a mix of strong and weak runners. Low intensity and high concentration make it a good exercise for the middle or end of a training camp when everyone is getting a bit worn out. I've used beaver O' with groups of relatively inexperienced orienteers at the Texas Junior O' Camp and it has gone pretty well. For inexperienced orienteers the line can be simple (following handrails, for example) and the pace can be low (even walking). Line O' can be "passive". A weakness with line O' (including beaver O') is that it can become "passive." Instead of reading the map and then looking in the terrain, you can get into a mode of looking into the terrain and then checking the map to see where you are. That isn't a worthless skill, but I think a more active approach is a better way to compete (Oyvin Thon talked about being a -- that's where I am going orienteer, not a that's where I am orienteer). posted by Michael | 11:27 AM 
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