Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Sunday, August 14, 2005 A quick look at the U.S. team's middle qualifying racesThe WOC organizers have posted split times from the races and those results include some analysis using some software called LapCombat. I don't really know how LapCombat works, but the software kicks out two interesting numbers. One is a "cruising speed index" and one is a "mistake ratio." In both measures, lower numbers are better. You can see an example here.I thought it'd be fun to look at how the U.S. runners did. We had six runners in the middle qualifying races and it looks like we had four decent races. We also had two quite bad races. Here is a quick summary. Boris, Sergey and Dan Boris had a decent race. He finished 22nd and missed qualifying by almost 4:30. LapCombat estimates his mistakes at 4:01. So, even with a perfect race, Boris wouldn't have qualified. Boris did a bit better in the second half of the course. Boris' race was about what I'd expect. He's a decent navigator and runner, but he doesn't have loads of experience or training. Let's hope Boris works hard and is ready to do better in Denmark. Sergey had a bad race. LapCombat estimates his mistakes on the first two controls at 1:51 and 5:41. The guy who started two minutes after Sergey, just beat him to the first control. You can see Sergey's course (with Tero's routes) here. The first control on Sergey's course looks fairly straightforward. The second looks tricky. I suspect -- and this is purely speculation -- that Sergey made a minor parallel error at 1 (probably checking one reentrant too soon) and then made a major parallel error at 2. It looks to me like the approach to 2 could be quite tricky. It'd be easy to miss the reentrant by 50 meters. It also would be easy to miss by a couple of hundred meters, heading down one of the major spurs to the east or west of the control. A few years ago, Sergey and I exchanged some emails about what he called the "first control syndrome." Sergey noted that people often miss the first control. Now, I've spent a bunch of time carefully studying splits from different races, looking for patterns. You won't find a clear tendency for people to make mistakes on the first control (in fact, the might be a slight tendency for people to do better on the first control). But, I've just been looking at overall patterns. Certainly, some individuals will have a tendency to miss the first control. Why? I'm not sure, maybe it is nerves. Maybe it is a self-fulfilling prophecy? Maybe Sergey is one of those people? Sergey is a strong runner. My impression is that he's an uneven orienteer. I thought he had a good chance to have a good race in Japan. At the middle qualifying race, he didn't have a good race. Dan also had a bad race. Dan lost, by LapCombat's calculations, 8:12 on the 10th control. Aside from that, he had a decent race. He was sitting in 18th place at the 9th control, then boomed...sort of. Take a look at the course Dan ran, with Mats Troeng's routes. Control 10 jumps out as a tricky control. Troeng described it as "the course's toughest leg." In general, controls that look tricky aren't. If you can see from the map that the control will be tough, you adapt your techniques (slow down and take a safe approach), and you don't miss it. Some more pure speculation....what might have happened to Dan is that he wasn't taking this control carefully because he was with someone. Sometimes running with someone helps, and sometimes it hurts. It can be easy to start to lose contact and become uncertain, but then trust (hope) that the other person has contact. Dan was running with a guy named Alexander Minakov from Russia. Minakov and Dan punched 3 together (actually a second apart), then they were within 5 seconds of each other at each of the next controls until ten. Minakov lost a chunck of time at 10, but found it a bit before Dan. Looking at the map, I'd guess that Dan and Minakov spent time in the area north and a bit east of the control. That looks like a rough, low visibility area. I can imagine running back and forth in that area trying to spot the control. There was also a control on a boulder a bit down hill from the control Dan and Minakov were looking for. I suppose they might have found themselves down there and then become confused. That close to the finish of a race it is hard to relax and make sense of what is going on. It can be tempting to start hunting rather than make a plan and follow it. Erin, Samantha and Pavlina I was going to write about the women. I've spent some time looking at the results. But, I'm tired of writing. It'll have to wait till tomorrow. Take a look at this web page Jukka Inkeri posted a link in a comment from my post about following. This is worth a look. You'll find a long course, redesigned to reduce the chances that runners could work together. posted by Michael | 8:30 PM 
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