okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Tougher to concentrate after 70 minutes
Eric wrote:
Today, I went for what was supposed to be a 2-hour orienteering workout at Hawn. I started out a bit faster than planned, but it felt good and I was being very accurate, so I continued at that pace. At about 70 minutes, I started having difficulty concentrating. I bobbled a couple controls and then really messed up a long leg. By force of will, I got back on my game for a bit, but fell apart again about fifteen minutes later....
I reviewed some of my bigger errors in 2007 and found that most of them occurred between 60 and 90 minutes....
This reminded me of something I found several years ago when I was looking at patterns of booms. I was specifically looking to see if there was a tendency for more booms to happen on the first control. I looked at a bunch of different races and checked to see where booms happened. What I found was that booms were not especially frequent on the first control, but there was an increase in the boom frequency on the last 15 minutes or so of a course.
I should replicate the analysis that I did a few years ago. With a lot more results in Winsplits, it ought to be a bit easier to do. I'll add it to my list of things to do someday.
