Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Thursday, September 18, 2003 Counting controlsA few years ago I started counting controls. I kept track of how many controls I found during races and training during the O' season.I was inspired to count controls when I'd heard that Bjornar Valstad had found some enormous number of controls (sorry, I don't remember the number) while preparing for the World Champs in Scotland. When I got hurt two years ago, I stopped counting controls. I've started again. So far I'm up to 38 for the season. I like counting controls as a measure of training. The number of controls you find is a good measure of how much O' training you do. I've also noticed some patterns -- my orienteering improves after I've found a certain number of controls over a period of about a month. A book I'm reading notes that the mathematician/astronomy Karl Friedrich Gauss thought that whenever possible one should count. Apparently Guass counted everything he could. If Gauss had been an orienteer, he'd have counted controls. I wonder what else he would have counted... posted by Michael | 1:05 PM 
Sunday, August 22, 2010 How to find 2000 controls in a yearAli and Boris have both set goals of finding 2000 controls over the next year. I'm a big fan of control counting and it'll be fun to see how they do. 2000 controls is a lot. If I were trying to find 2000 controls in a year, I think I'd:Go to a few training camps. Training camps are great ways to get a bunch of controls in a short period of time. Run more than one course at local events. Try to avoid junk controls. A junk control is one you find but you find without really focusing. Junk controls are great for the count, but the purpose isn't just to find 2000 controls, it is to use the goal as a way to improve your O' technique and running in the terrain. Do one 31-day challenge. Use a headlamp. Being able to run night orienteering makes it a lot easier to get in technique work in the winter. Live on or near a map. Ideally, you'd live right next to a huge, well mapped, forest. For most of us, it is more likely to mean you've got a sprint map nearby. Have fun. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 3:45 PM
Tuesday, May 15, 2007 5 ideas for getting Better1. Ask an unscripted question.2. Don't complain. 3. Count something. 4. Write something. 5. Change. These are Atul Gawande's suggestions for becoming a "positive deviant" (which is, basically, a way of saying "becoming better"). Gawande wasn't writing about orienteering, but I think his suggestions can easily be used by an ambitious orienteer. A few examples illustrate: Ask an unscripted question. Find someone after an O' race. Don't ask - how did it go? Ask them something different. Ask about their job or studies. Ask about their family. The idea is to make a connection with the person. Listen. Learn something you didn't know before. You'll make some connections. Making those connections makes orienteering more fun. Those kind of connections aren't going to immediately result in becoming a better orienteer. But they don't hurt and as you make more and more connections, you're more and more likely to learn and to find people you can help or who can help you. Peter G. once told me that he often makes a point of meeting someone at every event who he has never met before. Count something. Count how many times you train orienteering. Count how many times you run up and down a hill during training. Count how many controls you find in a year. You'll find that by counting something, you learn something. A few years ago, I read an interview with Bjornar Vlastad where he described how many controls he'd found in the 6 months leading up to winning a WOC. I started counting controls I found in training. Two things happened. First, because I was counting, I started doing more and more O' training. Finding more and more controls sharpened my technique. Second, I learned (though this took a bit longer) how much technique work it took to get in good technique form. Write something. After each race, write a sentence or two about each leg on the course. Write about what you did or what you saw or who you saw or how you felt. Write about what you'd do differently if you had the chance. Just write something. Write notes on the back of your map. Or write them on your training log. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 8:54 PM
Thursday, April 10, 2003 Next planned update is MondayLater this afternoon, I'm leaving for the West Point meet. I don't plan to update this page until Monday.I will have some access to the internet during the weekend and, if the mood strikes, I'll probably add a few notes. Check out Janne and Vroni's latest Janne Salmi's latest entry on his homepage is a report from a short training camp in Sweden. It is worth a look -- a couple of nice maps and some interesting text. Here is the report. Janne wrote that he found 169 controls and made 3.7 seconds of mistakes per control. That's not much time lost to mistakes. It is also a measure I haven't seen before. I've seen people counting controls and counting time lost, but it is the first time I've seen an average time lost per control. posted by Michael | 12:38 PM
Sunday, February 06, 2011 Some notes from yesterday's videoThe training was a bit unusual. The snow made it a lot slower to move. Since there aren't any controls out, I was a bit extra careful as I approached features that weren't point features. I wanted to make sure I was at the correct spot. For example, at the last control, I checked the map a couple of extra times to make sure I wasn't above or below the part of the feature I'd circled. I won't draw any strong conclusions from the video and counting the things I was counting. I think I see some tendencies....like, I do a better job with "active" map reading when the terrain is smooth (e.g. in flat open forest). I also see to have an internal clock that reminds me to check the map, even if I don't really need to look at it. *By "active" I mean looking at the map to pick out a feature I'd see in the future. By "passive" I mean seeing something in the terrain and looking at the map to check it off or, in a couple of cases, to see what it was. An example of what I mean by "active" is on the video at about 13:15 to 13:20. I looked at the map to make sure I had a plan for what I'd be doing after I dropped down a couple of lines (2.5 meter contours on this map) at a point where the shape of the contours bends (which is where I am at about the 13:40 point in the video). An example of what I mean by "passive" is on the video at about 16:05 to 16:10. I see the shape of a hillside off to my right, then look down at the map to see exactly which part of the hillside it is. Back to okansas.blogspot.com. posted by Michael | 10:43 AM
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