Occassional thoughts about orienteering
|
|
| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
|
|
Friday, February 04, 2005 Some notes about map studySome discussion over at Attackpoint inspired me to think about map study when I was driving home tonight. I came up with a couple of questions and even a few thoughts:1. How much map study do top orienteers do? In a few mouse clicks I can tell you that Kim Fagerudd's last training was a 55 minute jog with Robert where his legs felt tired; a few days ago Emma Engstrand ran 37:50 with an average heart rate of 167; and earlier today Pasi Ikonen did hill training and has posted his heart rate data and a movie of him running up a hill. I can see all sorts of information about how top orienteers are training physically, but I've got no idea if they do any map study. Other than stories of Thierry Gueorgiou's two-hour CatchingFeatures sessions, I can't recall any information about top orienteers map study habits. Maybe they don't do any? 2. What is the best way to study maps? Eric Bone wrote, "... I recommend against map-gazing, studying maps for long periods of time in an unfocused, terrain-touristy way. My hypothesis is that it's counter-productive, because when I have done a lot of map-gazing, it has seemed to reinforce poor map reading habits when racing." Eric Buckley wrote, "I've found "map-gazing" to be helpful if I'm looking at a course I've run." Eric Weyman (3 Erics in a row!) wrote, "Almost any map study can be worthwhile, but I think ebone is onto most relevant exercise, Mentally running courses with the same bang- bang intensity you use in competition, the quicker the better. This is the quality work that actually produces improvement, the rest is at best only base training, and I agree that some low quality training (physical, technical, or mental) can reinforce poor habits." Does map-gazing create bad habits? Does high intensity map study work best? I don't think anyone really knows. I think map-gazing can be very useful. I suspect that some higher-intensity map study may also work. I wonder if the answer is, "it depends"? It depends on your skill and experience. It depends on what specific map reading skill you're working on. In a race you've got to extract the key information quickly in a blink of an eye and while you're running. Maybe an analogous problem is a bird watcher trying to identify a bird in the field. The bird flashes by and the bird watcher has just a glimpse but uses that glimpse to identify the key features and figure out what kind of bird just went by. How do bird watchers do it? I think they spend time slowly and carefully studying bird books (analogous to map-gazing), but they also spend lots of time testing themselves in the field, for example after identifying a bird trying to re-identify the same bird in less time or with a shorter glance (analogous to high intensity map study). Or maybe I've gone off the deep end. posted by Michael | 8:07 PM 
Comments:
Post a Comment
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||
|
|||||
