okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Talking out loud as you orienteer....or read an x-ray
In a thread at Attackpoint about maintaining concentration, Ross wrote about talking out loud as you orienteer. Here is part of what he wrote:
Try talking out loud as you orienteer; verbalizing out loud the things going through your head and the things that should be going through your head. Talk about what's coming up, what you should be noticing, what techniques you are going to use, what you are going to do, what things you need to be careful about etc.
I like Ross' suggestion, both as a way to regain concentration during a race and as a training method.
The approach seems to parallel an idea I read about in Groopman's book How Doctors Think. Groopman has a chapter on how radiologists read x-rays and MRIs. If you think about it, interpreting a radiologist's job has some obvious similarities to reading a map. One of the radiologists Groopman interviewed describes dictating his reports as a way to be systematic and avoid errors in perception and analysis.
Maybe talking out loud as you orienteer helps "works" the same way - forcing you to be systematic and avoiding some of the common perception errors.
And for something completely different..some nice video of Matsuzaka pitching to Ichiro back in 1999...
I talk to myself all the time. I think it really helps.
My most successful Street Scrambles are when I run as a team, because I'm verbalizing my thoughts to the team about what to look for. I find that it helps me out, too.
