Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, July 19, 2003 The first control...again...I read this in today's Goteborgs Posten:The most important controls for an orienteer are the first, any controls that are immediately after a spectator control, and the next to last. Those are where it is easiest to lose concentration. "In the beginning and at the spectator controls you can be influenced by other people, in the end you're tired and the course setters try to have difficult controls near the end," says Thomas Asp. If you're just beginning a race it is easy to run too fast or not be ready to race. So, you miss the first control. When you pass through a spectator control you can easily start thinking about how you're doing or how you look to the spectators...and you miss the next control. On you're way to the last control, you begin to feel like the race is over. Maybe you start thinking about how good your race has been. Suddenly you're not thinking about what you're doing and...boom.... This is one of those things that sounds reasonable....but is not true. In fact, the first and next to last controls are not controls that orienteers miss very often. If you look at where orienteers boom, it won't be the first or next to last control. Well, there are some mistakes at the first and next to last control, of course. But, there aren't many. Here is a count of the number of mistakes for a series of 20 races:* first control = 36 booms second control = 51 booms third control = 51 booms fourth control = 55 booms fifth control = 32 booms sixth control = 42 booms ... two controls from the end = 38 booms next to last control = 30 booms last control = 5 booms When I look at split times the only real patterns I see consistently are that there are very few mistakes on the last control and somewhat fewer mistakes than average on the first control. It makes a lot of sense that there aren't many mistakes on the last control. The last control is usually right at the end of a marked finish chute. It is hard to miss. I'm not sure why people don't miss the first control more often than they do. One theory is that you're not tired. Being fresh has got to help. Another theory is that first controls might be set a little bit easier than other controls. Maybe that helps. I don't know. Actually, there is another pattern I think I'm seeing, but I haven't really looked at enough data to be sure what I'm seeing is really a pattern and not just my imagination. I'll hold off on writing about that pattern until I've looked at some more data. *The data is from a spreadsheet I've been building. The spreadsheet shows the number of booms by control for the top 14 runners in a series of races (using slit times reported in Winsplits to identify mistakes). I'm putting the spreadsheet together for a little analysis I'm working on. I wasn't looking at first control/next to last control (since I've already looked at that issue enough to know what the data shows), but when I read the story in GP I knew the spreadsheet had the info I needed to look at those issues quickly. posted by Michael | 9:11 PM 
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