Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Wednesday, December 27, 2006 Helping Boris Boris has been having some trouble reading maps like the one to the left while night orienteering. He wrote:During the last few night-O's, I noticed that one of the things that lead me to lose a lot of time is not being able to quickly pinpoint where I am on the map when I glance down on it. Since in night-O, one can only afford very quick glances before running into a tree or a wild Swede, this means that I often look down at my map and get no information from it in that one glance - all I manage to do is find where I am, and by then it's time to look up again.... This sounds like a pretty interesting problem to think about: how can you get more information from a quick glance at the map? My experience (and a bit of guessing) suggests there are three main things to do: 1. Improve your ability to quickly glance at a map and see the map. Armchair map study helps this. Peter believes that studying with short glances works best. I've tried both short glances and staring and found both approaches work. 2. Improve your ability to run wihtout running into tress or a "wild Swede." Being able to run in the forest without thinking about running in the forest makes map reading much easier. It takes a lot of work, but it makes everything easier. 3. Improve your ability to shift your focus from looking ahead to looking at the map in your hand (complicated by the fact that the bright light from a headlamp has a tendency to be hard on your eyes at night). As my eyes get older, the time it takes to change from focusing on distance to focusing on a map seems to get longer. I also have trouble seeing some of the fine details, but that is really a different issue. I suspect you can train your eyes to handle the focus shift quicker. I set up some exercises to practice this (basically, quickly shifting back and forth between focusing on something on the other side of the room to focusing on a page in my hand). But I didn't have the discipline to stick with the training for more than a few weeks. The training had some effect - I got much better at the exercise. I'm not sure if it would translate to map reading during a race, but I think it probably would. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 9:01 PM 
Comments:
All of the listed suggestions sound good. I would emphasize the more relevant quick glances over gazing.
However my first issue or questions would be about about simple mechanics- map folding, thumbing, arm position closer to face? map angle/ position relative to light? Among these, I would first check thumbing position, not necessarily where the thumb is, but finding the best possible "pointer" to keep position on the map. This could be the thumbnail corner/tip, corner of compass, or mark on compass. The actual compass, and personal comfort would be important factors. I have almost zero Night O experience, but it is easy to believe that there would be a different technique at night. Whether at night or not, this is a good topic, perhaps overlooked. EricW # posted by
 : 9:49 PM
Nice suggestions, both Spike and Eric. Perhaps I will experiment with different map folding and thumbing techniques. Also, Spike, what are those controls on Nåsten from?
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- Boris # posted by
: 2:10 PM |
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