Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Wednesday, October 19, 2005 Some night O' thoughtsBoris ran night O' training at Lunsen tonight (see the map clips to get an idea of the terrain). He struggled a bit.His experience got me to thinking about night O'. Here are a few thoughts: 1. Lunsen is about as hard a place as you can find to do night O'. The contours are 2.5 meters, so it is flat and everything looks pretty similar. At Lunsen you don't get many breaks. Relocating is hard.  2. Boris has little experience running night O' and based on what he wrote on his training log, he's not used to running in the forest at night. It takes a while to get used to the feeling of being in the forest at night. It takes a while to feel comfortable running with just a beam of light in front of you. Some more experience running in the forest with his headlamp and Boris will be fine. One of the nice things about living in Sweden is that you can almost always find terrain close to home. I lived on a map. In the winter, I did most of my runs (even if they weren't with a map) in the forest and with my headlamp. I got comfortable running in the woods at night. 3. Night O' technique is the same as regular O' technique. It is just that the margin for error is a lot smaller. If you lose contact at night, you can lose a lot of time. Night O' punishes sloppy navigation. That's why it is good training.  4. Boris wrote, "Being lost in the woods can be fun, but when it's dark and you are cold and wet, it stops being fun in a hurry." If you're cold and wet, you're probably not wearing the right clothes. I wonder if Boris owns neoprene socks. If not, he needs to get some. When it is cold and wet (Lunsen has plenty of marshes that can be wet), you're feet will be uncomfortable if you don't have neoprene socks.  5. Night O' penalizes sloppy navigation, but it doesn't penalize slow running as much as regular orienteering does. In fact, sometimes running slow can help you at night. When I was first learning to run night O', I'd do a hard run the day before. I wanted my legs to be sore and tired at the start of the night O'. If my legs were sore and tired, then I ran slow and had the mindset that I couldn't afford to make any mistakes because I was going so slowly. After a while, my technique improved and I got comfortable running at night. When that happened, I didn't need to have sore legs at the start of a night race. posted by Michael | 7:55 PM 
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