Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, February 21, 2004 Some notes about O' trainingOver the years, I've been given a lot of advice about orienteering. Among the advice that I've heard from different people I have a lot of respect for are:Don't train technique more than one or two times a week or you get stale Don't train a lot of technique on maps you are familiar with or you'll develop bad habits Both of these ideas are logical and pretty close to conventional wisdom. But, over the years I'm not sure either of them is correct. True, you can get stale when you are doing a lot of technique training. But, I'm not convinced a lot of technique training makes you stale. True, you can develop bad habits when you train a lot on maps you are familiar with. But, you don't have to develop bad habits when you train on maps you are familiar with. My experience has been that I've had several periods when I had a bunch of good races when I was ignoring both of the bits of conventional wisdom. I was training a lot of technique (usually 3-4 sessions a week) and I was doing a bunch of the training on maps I was familiar with. I didn't get stale and I didn't develop bad habits. Why? Probably because I was very motivated. One of the notes I wrote about training yesterday was "experiment." One way to experiment is to take something you've been doing or some bit of conventional wisdom that's guided your training...throw it out. See what happens is you go against conventional wisdom. One advantage to experimenting is that you can gain an edge. You'll see this in other sports all the time. Someone might figure out a new technique that works a lot better (I'm thinking of that high jumper who first figured out how to go backwards over the bar...can't remember the guy's name). In baseball, teams figured out that they can do a good job of identifying players who will contribute to the team and might not be expensive by focusing on on-base-percentage rather than flashier statistics. The teams that figured this out first managed to get an advantage. The disadvantage to experimenting is that a lot of the conventional wisdom is there for a reason. A lot of conventional wisdom makes sense. Going against conventional wisdom can be risky. Experimenting can be difficult. The trick is figuring out what makes sense and what doesn't. The way to do that is think, talk to people, then experiment. posted by Michael | 8:08 AM 
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