Why don't you win all the time?

[SeanC]

Family taxi driver wrote

"There's a few good ideas for me to work on thanks!"

A couple of things I forgot

- Have you subscribed to Compass Sport? There's plenty of good advice in there. The editor no doubt has some back issues he can let you have cheaply.

- Some of the club websites have some good advice for beginners. Not sure which one is best though? Maybe they are too basic for you now?

[Neil M40]

This is the most interesting thread in here for months! Great! I love the toggle boxes and on-line voting. Can we have one a week?

Anyone can create a thread with on-line voting. When you start a new thread there is a tab at the bottom for poll creation - just type in the options you want. This is the first time I've tried it, I think.

Nothing helpwise at local club and no regular training done there. What else could I/should I be doing?

A lot of clubs do not put on regular coaching but most have a club coach listed amongst their committee members. If your club has one, you could ask them for some help.

Using your local permanent course is a good idea but has obvious limitations - after two or three visits you will have exhausted the possibilities. Sooner or later you have to take the plunge and do some orienteering without control markers. Slow it right down, walk if necessary, stop when you need to, double check everything before leaving your attack point and you should be ok. This is more or less the approach a planner will take and it makes you really think about what you are doing. Line courses are good for this approach - join up a string of features where you can use each one as the attack point for the next. Make yourself go slow enough to read all the features on your line and if you lose track stop and work it out. As you improve you will be able to read the features and stick to the line without slowing down/stopping so much.

Get somebody who is really good to give you a demonstration of how it should be done. Walk/jog round a technical course with them while they explain how they approach each leg, which features they are using to navigate by, looking ahead for, reacting to, when they are using their compass, pacing, whatever. Actually I have just made this up - I don't know if anybody has ever tried this but I think it would be useful. You might struggle to find somebody prepared to try it. Something similar was done to me on a junior squad tour 25 years ago (not quite the same - it was more of a two-way discussion than a demonstration). I had thought I was good but the coach really was good and it opened my eyes to what was possible.

[rocky]

interesting thread Neil. i often lurk on running forums because, as you say, beneath the cliquey chat and in jokes there is often a lot of good advice and discussion. eightlane is usually awful, but at least i realise that while i lurk. if you're feeling incredibly brave, visit the letsrun.com forums.

one thing to bear in mind is that improvement is much easier to measure in a road running sense than in orienteering. for example, i know that because i ran a 10k 15s slower tonight than i did a month ago, that spending two weeks running round forests and up and down mountains in scandinavia is not the best way to improve my road running. however it would be hard to find a way which would definitively showthis led to an improvement in my orienteering.

as for answering your original question it varies by discipline:
Sprint: i can win, but not always. i am fast enough, i don't usually make mistakes, i just don't take orienteering seriously enough to bother getting everything perfect enough which is what is required for consistent sprint success. Some day...
Middle: i have the speed but i make mistakes.
Long: i don't know. usually i can account for half the time between myself and the winner in mistakes, the rest is not being aggressive enough, fit enough, or something else....
Relays: i do always win*in britain this year given a realistic chance

[graeme]

Nothing helpwise at local club

I don't what club you're with, but this seems unlikely. Plenty of clubs dont have formal coaching, and plenty of people have no coaching qualification. But its very unusual to find an orienteer who wont give you some advice as to where you went wrong, and its often good advice too. Planners in particular (should) always have a good idea of how a leg should be tackled. Just ask.

Relays: i do always win*

except when I'm on your team.

[geomorph]

one thing to bear in mind is that improvement is much easier to measure in a road running sense than in orienteering. for example, i know that because i ran a 10k 15s slower tonight than i did a month ago, that spending two weeks running round forests and up and down mountains in scandinavia is not the best way to improve my road running. however it would be hard to find a way which would definitively showthis led to an improvement in my orienteering.

Yes. Running speed wrt to your peers on roads/major paths does not equate to how well you would do against the same folk in off-road. In the former I used to be less than 2% off, but I never got less than 10% off for orienteering (on those few occasions when I navigated close to error free). One factor is stride length. Long stride (for your height)is a distinct disadvantage off road (increasingly so as the terrain roughness increases), but gives an edge in road runnning. To move from one to the other requires changing muscle usage. Optimise one set and the other may be become sub-optimal.

I'm not sure how good it is as a measure for orienteering speed (ex technical) but try waymarking (discretely) a set of different x-c terrains (to ensure consistent distance and physical challenge, and timing your performance regularly. Do the time trials mixed in an overall training session, and at different points in the session

[Pippa]

A suggestion for the drafted-in parents out there: get involved with the local junior squad* or suggest a training day if your kids aren't at this level, and shadow people. Provided the kids don't leg it off (don't worry they'll be standing still scratching their heads 30 secs later) I always notice much more when I'm shadowing. e.g. have they noticed that boulder which tells them when to turn off the path? do they know they're drifting off their bearing and we've dropped into the wrong re-entrant, which is obvious cos there's a steam in this one...etc. When shadowing I get the feeling my brain is orienteering ahead of my legs, which is always better than the other way round.

*allowing for various hoops to jump through such as CRB checks

A second tip is to train without kites. I was hesitant to try this, and it does rely on a semi-decent map so you don't get in a strop. Try to pick obvious features like boulders rather than re-entrants to start with. This will teach you to navigate all the way to the feature, rather than embarking on a kite hunt each time you get in the circle. Just don't go back to relying on kites at the next race - I rate each control depending upon whether I knew where the control was going to be before I saw it.

Remember: "you are fast when you know where you are going" (not my quote, but TG's)

Pippa

[geomorph]

A second tip is to train without kites. I was hesitant to try this, and it does rely on a semi-decent map so you don't get in a strop. Try to pick obvious features like boulders rather than re-entrants to start with. This will teach you to navigate all the way to the feature, rather than embarking on a kite hunt each time you get in the circle. Just don't go back to relying on kites at the next race - I rate each control depending upon whether I knew where the control was going to be before I saw it.

OD offer at least two events in which hardboard 'plates' with emit blocks attached are used on all or part of a course. Some of the features are tiny - spotted from less than 5m. This is fantastic training, and getting your kids to try this does exactly what Pippa suggests - teaches them (and their parents who don't want to be embarrassed) to navigate, and keep in constant touch with the map.

I'm also an advocate of maps ex man-made features (except where safety concerns). In areas of high path density this ups the technical aspects. Controls can be very technical within 10m of a path.

[Kitch]

One thing all this reveals is how few people have a clue about how to improve.

two pieces of advice

First -
Train

Second - and fundamentally -
Specifically

Physically this means you run - not swim, not gym, not bike - run
you run in terrain, you run up hills, and down, you run on a muddy track, a winding path.

Technically this means you disect your orienteering technique and practise the insdividual skills in dedicated specially designed exercises.

finally
maximise your strengths - minimise your weaknesses.

[Familytaxi driver]

Thanks for even more ideas everyone.
Yes I subscribe (the family does) to Compass Sport. Yes the helpful editor sent some xtra back issues he had lying around and encouraged me to have a go myself.
Articles such as how to plan an Orange/Lt Green etc I found v good to know what I should be doing.

Yes Local Club does help no planned coaching or regular runs etc but people will comment when asked, it's not always so easy to find the planner of the event but Yes I should ask more.Our local events are quite low key. We are now putting up signs to discuss your run after so that should create a knot of people and make it easier to talk through my route. That's often all it takes for the penny to drop about my glaring errors!

I am finding the limits of permanent courses even with the few times I've managed to go. Walking slowly through and picking a line and the other suggestions will be good to make me look at features more closely and extend the use of the maps. Thought about getting teenager to doctor them also and remove the paths/make windows to navigate between.
Give me 12 months to work on all that and I should be a lot better!
Thanks again for all the suggestions.