Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, June 04, 2005 "You can observe a lot by watching"I watched people orienteer at TJOC. I shadowed six juniors on one course. I also spent some time sitting at controls watching people approach and leave. During some of the mass start events I ran in a small pack and paid attention to what the others were doing (which explains some of my poor orienteering).I noticed a few things: The juniors seemed to expend their energy very unevenly. They'd run hard, then have to slow down and rest. They'd push hard up the hills, then jog to recover on the flats. Some would fight through the rough vegetation, when easing off a bit and trying to run smoothly would probably have been faster. Orienteers don't look up enough. You can't see very far if you don't pick up your head. Of course, in the Texas terrain you have to keep an eye on the ground because you'll suffer a lot of you run through some of the cactus. By looking up and ahead you can pick out the control or big features and move a lot faster. I'm not sure how to train people to look ahead. I told most of the people I shadowed to try to look up. There are huge differences in how people run through the forest. Some keep a fairly straight line and jump over stuff (like the cactus). Most keep a fairly straight line but zig-zag through the cactus. Some make an extreme effort to avoid rough stuff (mostly cactus). One kid I shadowed jumped down a big cliff that he easily could have avoided. When he went hopping off the cliff I was terrified he'd bust a leg. He didn't. After the run I told him to be careful about jumping down cliffs. I was surprised at how few times most people looked at their maps during the legs. It seemed like people looked intently at the map as they left a control or approached a control, but they didn't look at the map much during the leg. Maybe they aren't able to read the map on the run. I felt like most of the juniors weren't reading their maps enough. I suggested -- half joking -- that Chase get up on the climbing tower with a megaphone and yell, "look at the map," every 15 seconds. posted by Michael | 8:02 PM 
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