Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Thursday, November 20, 2003 Oystein on concentrationI've translated an article from Oystein Kristiansen on concentration. Oystein wrote this in a response to a thread on a Norwegian O' discussion forum.What is O' technique? Petter Thoreson told me a few years ago when I came to Halden, "O' technique is everything going on in your head from the start to the finish, but first and foremost it is the ability to concentrate." Clearly the reason most orienteers get better over time is because they've built up a bank of experiences through a long career. Experience solving problems in different types of terrain, weather, stressful situations, time of the day and maps is essential for how you succeed as an orienteer. So an orienteer needs to go out and get experience with all of these factors at a young age (in particular as a junior and in the first senior years). But the most important thing is that you are conscious of what you are training. Too many orienteers go to trainings and just "run a course." I think you don't get especially good by doing that. If you come to the training session with an idea of what you are going to train, ideally one thing each time (entry to the control, concentration, compass or whatever), you'll get a lot of benefit from the training. You'll become a little better during the session, which is not the case if you train like a chicken with its head cut off. It is one thing to practice a skill in training; it is another thing to get it to work under a stressful situation. That's where the differences between the really good and the next best are apparent. Mental skills determine whether someone is best when it really matters most. Anyone who has run in the front of a TioMila or Jukola, or has run a WOC, knows that all of the world's physical and technical training won't matter if you haven't trained how to perform under stress. Performing under stress is also an O' technique. I told my students at the O' school in Amal, "You should be so focused on the relationship between the map and the terrain that you won't lose concentration if Princess Victoria is standing naked at one of the controls." In Halden we call this type of dealing with stress "behendighetstrening" [I'm not sure what to call this in English. Behendig means handy, deft or adroit. Handy-training, deft-training or adroit-training all sound stupid.] You have to be deft at handling unexpected situations. And in orienteering you face unexpected situations from the start. It is impossible to concentrate 100 percent on orienteering. Even in a 10-minute sprint race your mind will wander a few times. But you can train to be able to discover a slip in concentration soon and get your focus back. You have to train the "trigger" in your brain -- you want to hear the alarms early -- and the more you train it, the sooner you'll be able to discover when you've lost your concentration and you can avoid mistakes. Concentration is easy to train because you concentrate many times during each day. The problem is to do it consciously as training. Concentration in stressful situations is something you should train. And this is where there are lots of activities to use. A tip is to try an activity that you haven't done before where the consequences of lost concentration show up in the results. Some examples include shooting, gymnastics, downhill skiing and downhill mountain biking. Or perhaps the best thing if you want to be a world class orienteer: get yourself in a situation where you are in the lead of a big relay race with the responsibility for 9 or 6 other team members. You don't want to be the one to sink the team. It is possible to write a lot about how you can train O' technique, but in the end, it is all about the ability to concentrate. That's why the ability to concentrate is a fundamental skill. It is much more important than the ability to run 3000 meters under 9 minutes. A few are born with the ability to focus on the right things, the rest of us apologiesain. My appologies if I've misunderstood or mistranslated any of the text. I should also note that I usually get permission from the author before I translate and post this much text. But, I don't have an email address for Kristiansen, so I haven't asked for his permission. I'll just trust that if he posted the text to the O' forum at Staff-Valstad.com he won't object to me translating it. posted by Michael | 1:23 PM 
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