Occassional thoughts about orienteering
|
|
| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
|
|
Sunday, December 10, 2006 A sprint leg and a training ideaTake a look at the sprint leg from last weekend's KU campus race. The leg is a bit over 150 meters long.I've sketched in three routes. An easy question: which route is fastest? Now a trickier question: how much slower are the other routes?  One of my favorite training sessions is to pick several routes for a given leg; predict the time differences; test the routes; and compare my estimates of the time differences to my tests of the time differences. The idea is to train my brain to make trade-offs. In the leg above, it might be worth giving up a few seconds to take a leg that is a bit simpler, but gives you a smoother route, leaving time to look ahead at the next few legs. But, to make that sort of decision, you need to be able to not just pick out the fastest route, but have a reasonable sense of how much slower other options are. Another reason I like this sort of training is you can make good use of strange legs. You can set a leg that has only one obvious route and then test a couple of routes that are clearly slower and that you wouldn't even consider during a race. It is a good way to make use of maps that you're familiar with. For the record, the fastest route is b. Route a was nearly 15 seconds slower (I'd estimated it would be more like 10 seconds slower). I never tested c, but I'd expect it to be similar to a. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. Labels: route choice, sprint orienteering, training posted by Michael | 5:26 PM
Comments:
I took route b when I ran it.
Coincidentally, I just did the same thing all afternoon for my courses at UW. Most legs have 2 or 3 options, so I ran them all to test them out. It was fun, and I got some rather unexpected results, too. # posted by
 : 7:59 PM
I took b, but mostly because it seemed clear that it was close enough to redline that it couldn't be much worse than anything else. In a sprint, I don't get too complicated - too easy to squander the whole gain by screwing something up thinking about routes. Of course, that bit me on the leg to 17. I should have thought a bit more about that one since the route through the field was fatally slower.
# posted by
: 10:03 PM
Why do you expect c to be similar to a? c is shorter, no sharp turns, no stairs, wide road. I must be very close to b, or even faster if stairs slow you down a bit (steep/slippery).
-Jagge- # posted by
: 3:16 AM
I reckon c would be just as good as b, for the same reasons, smooth running (no corners and no stairs)
Post a Comment
# posted by
: 3:58 PM |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
||||
|
|||||
