Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Friday, December 12, 2003 Blown leadsHow often does an orienteer have a lead going in to the last kilometers of a race only to slow down or miss a control and lose the race?Orienteering would seem to be a sport where it'd be easy to blow a late-race lead. Because you're on your own you don't really know how your doing compared to your competition. If you're having a good race, can you ease off a bit and preserve the lead or do you need to keep pushing? Maybe you're in the lead and easing off will drop you back to second. Maybe your second and easing off keeps you from moving up. Maybe you push the pace, boom a control and drop way back. Before reading any further, take a guess: What percent of the time do top racers blow a lead in the last ten minutes of a race? If you looked at split times, how many times would someone who won the race be in 2nd (or worse) with ten minutes left? Think about those questions and make a guess... ...then keep reading... I can't immediately recall blowing a lead. But, I remember coming from behind when a competitor blew a lead. Way back in the late 1980s at a race in Rhode Island, Mikell Platt boomed a control with less than one kilometer to go. I didn't. Mikell's boom was large enough that I beat him (in fact I think I even passed him in the forest without seeing him). If the course had been a kilometer shorter, Platt would have won. I'm sure I've blown a lead. But, an example doesn't come to mind immediately. Wait, one just came to mind. I was running the second leg of a small relay race in Stockholm called Tullingeruset. I went out at the back of the lead pack of perhaps 15 runners strung out over less than one minute. The course was short -- maybe 3-4 kilometers -- and early in the race the leaders boomed. I took the lead. I ran hard and clean. I made it to the radio control in the lead. But by then the pack had recovered and run me down. I drifted back and exchanged to the next running in about 10th place, maybe 30 seconds behind the leaders. I was thinking about blown leads last night and decided to take a look at split times and see how often top orienteers blow leads. I looked at split times from 40 races in Sweden during the past year. I looked at equal number of races for men and women. I looked at M21 and F21 elite results except I also looked at the results from the Swedish junior team selection races. For each race, I answered two questions: 1. At the first control at least ten minutes into the race, what place did the eventual winner have? 2. At the last control at least ten minutes before the finish, what place did the eventual winner have? The second question was the one I was most interested in. I figure that if the eventual winner was not in first place, someone must have blown the lead. In those 40 races, the eventual winner was in the lead with ten minutes to go 29 times. 11 leads were blown. For this group of elite Swedish races, leads were blown in 28 percent of the races. Is that a lot? I don't know. I guess spending some more time looking at split times would give me an idea. posted by Michael | 9:05 PM 
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