okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Performance Enhancing....
...Glasses.
One of the highlights of the weekend was seeing the legendary Eric W. back in competition. I'm disappointed to say that he not only ran the same leg as me in the relay, but he did so a minute or so faster. But that is really beside the point.
Eric was running wearing reading glasses.
I've become a huge fan of magnification for orienteering. I use a thumb magnifier and I've recently been using sport glasses with reading-glass lens. Without some sort of magnifier, I struggle to deal with detailed maps. But, I've also noticed that even when the map is large scale (like a 1:4000 sprint map) the magnifier helps. Even if a magnifier isn't necessary, it helps.
If I could go back 20 years - back to when my eyesight was fine - I'd like to see if running with a magnifier would have helped (i.e. would have let me get a little bit more out of a short glance at the map). I wonder if reading glasses would have helped, too.
