okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Football and orienteering
I've been reading The Blind Side and, as usual when I read, I've been thinking about how it relates to orienteering.
One of the concepts in the book is that football strategies "evolve" in response to specific pressures. For example, LT forced teams to have huge, fast left tackles in order to protect the quarterbacks.
How can I connect that idea to orienteering?
What is the orienteering equivalent of having LT crash into you and push you face first into the ground (or even snap your lower leg bones)? Maybe it is creating an artificial constraint on your training and then experimenting with training approaches to adapt. The constraint forces you to adapt the same way that LT forced football teams to adapt. As an example, think about how you would train if you could only devote half the time you usually do to training?
I did something like that a long time ago. I cut back on the amount of training I did. It forced to to increase the "quality" of what I was doing. It didn't take long before my racing improved noticeably. It also corresponded with learning a whole lot about orienteering - technique, racing, training, etc. - that I hadn't figured out in the previous 10 years of orienteering.
