Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Sunday, October 16, 2005 Scoring legsI spent the day resting my ankle. That gave me plenty of time to think. Unfortunately, instead of thinking, I spent a bunch of time watching football on TV.I did spend a few minutes thinking about simple ways of describing O' legs. I figure I'll start each leg description with the leg number and length (in 100s of meters). What is more interesting is coming up with a way to describe the technical and physical demands of each leg. After some thought, I decided to describe each leg in terms of the three most important technical demands and two most important phsycial demands. I try to think like this: If this leg was all I was training for, what are the three technical demands and two phsyical demands that would be most important? Demands are different from techniques. For example, demands would be something like keeping rough distance and direction. Techniques would be something like following a compass bearing and counting paces. A few examples might make it clearer.  1, 4; simple route choice, navigating by big features, and rough distance and direction; Running in the terrain, running trails. What that means is that the first control is about 400 meters long. The most important technical demand is making a simple route choice. The next most important is navigating by big features, like the open area, the major trail and the narrow gap between the green areas. The third most important technique would be holding a rough direction and distance. The most important physcal demand that will make a difference on this leg is running in the terain (I'm thinking of the last 150-200 meters where you approached the control). A second phsyical demand is running on trails/open areas. 2, 4; simple route choice, navigating by big features, and rough distance and direction; Running trails, running in the terrain. The second leg is essentially the same. I reversed the physical demands, but you can make a case that you should keep the order the same. Here are a couple examples using a different course. The map is from the Swedish Champs (with Mats Troeng's route).  1, 2; precise distance and direction, simplifying the terrain structure, none; running in the terrain, running uphill. So on this leg, of about 200 meters, the key technical demand is being able to hold direction and distance precisely. You could do that by setting a compass bearing and counting steps, or by using rough compass and reading the map carefully. Another key technical demand on this leg -- not as important -- is seeing the overall structure in the terrain, for example noticing the steep hillside south of the control and just outside the control circle. This leg is through the forest and uphill. Here is another: 5, 11; moderately complicated route choice, rough distance and direction, precise distance and direction; running in the terrain, running on trails. The fifth leg is about 1.1 km long. The key technical demand is a route choice. It isn't very complicated, but it is a bit more complicated than a simple left-right decision. You have to think a bit about differences in running speed on different surfaces. You could run most of this leg with rough direction and distance judgement, but near the end of the leg you'd need to be a bit more precise. The physical demands are pretty straightforward -- run fast in the terrain and then run fast on the trail. One more: 8, 2; none; running on trail/smooth surface, not going too hard. The 8th leg is short and has essentially no orienteering demands. There are not decision and the navigation is trivial. You would need to run fast. You can also make a case that an important physical demand on this sort of leg is to avoid running too fast. The next thing I need to do is come up with an easier way of writing the descriptions. I can develop some sort of "code" for the common demands. That'd make it a bit easier to write (though harder to read unless you know the code). So what? Why am I doing this? What, if anything, might I learn? Describing legs like this is a way to force myself to think carefully about what is going on during a leg. It gives me a system to think about the demands of a course. It is a bit like scoring a baseball game. When you score a baseball game, you watch closely and notice things you might not have noticed otherwise. Maybe if I "score" or "code" a bunch of legs I'll discover something. posted by Michael | 6:56 PM 
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