okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Saturday, February 28, 2004
High frustration training
Today's training was what you might call "high frustration" training:
The forest was rough -- thick and thorny.
The course was hilly.
The control locations were diffuse (subtle and not-quite-mapped-right contour features).
The map was old (1988, I think).
Still, it was fun. But if you polled the six of us who ran, I'd bet you'd get maybe 50 percent who felt it was mostly just frustrating.
It can be interesting to see how people react (me included) to difficult or frustrating training or racing conditions. I tend to get quite annoyed when a control is misplaced, so much so that I have a lot of trouble concentrating. Unfortunately, controls get misplaced on a fairly regular basis at local events around Kansas City. Some people seem to get particularly frustrated by thick forest -- a main feature of the orienteering terrain around Kansas City.
On the other hand, some people seem to always make the best of the situation. I remember running through a particularly thick section of local forest with a Swiss orienteer named Dieter Wolf about 20 years ago. I felt almost embarrassed about how unpleasant our forest was, so I was a bit anxious about what Wolf would think. What'd he think? "That was really fun!"
posted by Michael |
7:23 PM
