Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Thursday, July 27, 2006 Making mistakesDaniel (piutepro on Attackpoint) has been training to make mistakes. Here is a bit of what he's written:I spent almost two hours mistaking this morning....It turned into an experiments of mind sets and about the mental process while orienteering. I also began break some of the self-imposed rules. What about running with the map in the left instead of the right hand? What about cutting through the worst mountain laurel around? What about going so slow, that it seems stupid? What about assuming that I can read a complicated area which I normally would just brush over or go around or look for one obvious feature in it. And The practice of mistakes/errors/confusion is fascinating. It almost takes the pain out of making mistakes, since this is the purpose of going out. I definitely had to think something during the practice, almost a philosophy of what failure means. The basic concept is probably, that every runner makes mistakes. The advanced runners recognize them earlier, correct them faster and bounce back mentally right away. My first thought is that practicing making mistakes is a strange idea. Why not just practice orienteering and, when and if you make a mistake, practice recovering? But, as I think about it, I become more interesting in Daniel's experiment. One of his conclusions, that good orienteers recognize mistakes sooner, correct them faster, and bounce back right away, is consistent with my experience. In general, when I'm orienteering well, I make fewer mistakes and recover from them quicker. Kent Olsson talks about recognizing a little nagging feeling before a boom becomes a big boom. He talks about recognizing that feeling and immediately taking some action. That's consistent with Daniel's thinking. The closest I've come to practicing mistakes is probably doing "relocation" - running for a bit without reading the map, then stopping and trying to relocate. It can be a fun way to train. It might be training a skill needed to recover from a mistake. But it doesn't feel at all like making a mistake during a race. While I haven't practiced making mistakes, I often spend a few minutes before a race thinking about the type of mistakes I could make (often as a way of thinking about the terrain and map) and how I might recover from those mistakes. posted by Michael | 8:35 PM 
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