okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
7 minutes/km
One of the exercises we're setting up for this weekend's local training camp is to run a course after spending a bunch of time studying each leg before hand. The idea is to study each leg and talk about how we're going to run it. What route choice options are there? What are the pros/cons of each option? What will you see as you run each leg? What do you need to be careful off?
Thinking about this exercise reminded me of some orienteering I did with a psychologist who was looking at how orienteers performed at their best. The psychologist, a guy named Charles Parry, was at a pre-WOC training camp in Sweden to interview world class orienteers and coaches.
I took Charles out on one of the maps to try to get him to understand a bit more about orienteering. Here is what we did. At each control, we'd discuss how to run the next leg. I'd talk about what he would see and point things out on the map. We'd thoroughly discuss each leg. Then, he'd run the leg without even looking at the map. With basically no previous experience, he was running 7 min/km - a respectable pace (of course, we didn't count all of the time discussing each leg).
It struck me that it was a good way to introduce someone to how a good orienteer works. That's the idea (or maybe just the hope) behind the training session at this weekend's camp. I hope it works.
