Discussion: Bridging the gap between good and expert navigator

A bit of background, I have been doing adventure racing for 5 years and have become a decent navigator. Our team as won 2 of the 4 Beast races in Seattle this year. This is mainly due to good navigation, as we are not the fastest players out there. I have gotten quick on O maps on determining the quickest course. However, every time I seem to make at least one error and want to become even more efficient.

My biggest concern however, are on larger maps (1:24,000 and larger). I floundered during the first half of an 8 hour Rogaine this year. I still have issues with distance vs time and reading into terrain too much (i.e. seeing features in the land that are not accounted for on a 40 foot contour scale). For example, I will think I am in the correct reentrant when there is even a larger correct reentrant further along. My goal is eventually do longer expedition races in the future and to become an expert navigator (how would you even define what an expert navigator is?)

Obviously, practice, practice, practice is the true answer. Run as many O courses and Rogaine events I can get my hands on. But what I am looking for are tricks or practice routines that I may not be thinking of. What can I do in my downtime between events (i.e. over the winter) to give me that further edge?

Catching Features is one thing you can try.

Measuring the distance traveled, is another. On a 1:10000 or 1:15000 while running it is pretty easy to count your strides and estimate with a certain level of precision how long have you traveled.

When you get used to that (as you say practice, practice, practice) you would be able to get away by estimating your distance traveled by 'feel'. But this is really tricky and for us laymen tend to backfire more often than not. Also when you switch to long AR races involving slower speeds jog/walk and 1:24000 maps, your dialed up feel is messed up big time.

For orienteering events your best bet is stride counting. Do a controlled run on different terrains with different inclines and figure out how many strides it takes you to cover 100 meters.
You can start simple with 4-5 samples: uphill, downhill, flat terrain, flat road. The easiest way from here is to add a paper ruler on one edge of your compass where the units are your strides. Of course you need to have different rulers for different O map scales, but it works pretty good once you learn to use it and actually count as you run. ( And you want to use that approach close to your check points or for relatively shorter distances, not through your whole race )

Alternative for orienteering events is timing your run. Works really well on a flattish areas with similar vegetaition passability across the whole map. And it is less focuss intense. Just clock your time on 100 m through the terrain with race pace. If you do your homework for the area where you are going to race this might be as precise approach as stride counting ,with a much lower mental cost.

For adventure racing distance measuring techniques, you are probably more experienced than me since I have just several 24 h and as much 6 and 8 h races behind my back.

Since I come from orienteering background, my distance measuring feel is completly screwed up in AR. If I need to measure a leg I never rely on feel. If it is a distance up to about a kilometer I will count strides, if it is a longer leg I'll use my average time per km pace to measure.

As for features on a 1:24000 map with a 40 feet contours, I have given up on that. I rely almost exclusively on my compass (taking precise bearing and mesuring distances)
And I could say that this approach have worked pretty good for me. All these maps are more or less made with the help of GPS and air photography, so the the one thing that most surely would be correctly represented is the relative positions of any two points on the map. So on theory (and I could say for me in practice) precise bearing and distance measuring should give you good results with less messed up controls on your race.

Navigation to me is a game of crossword or Sudoku where you are given a portion of the answer and must fill in the blanks to get the complete picture. Like these games, navigation involves taking input from your surroundings and making it fit to the information on the map and making sound decisions based on that limited information......and like crosswords, the more pieces you have, the easier it becomes.

Distance is only one part of the puzzle. Pace counting to find the right reentrant will work but determining how large the feature is in the first place by looking at the contour lines would be faster.

I've struggled with this in past AR and I agree that determining what will and won't show up on a USGS map takes a little practice. I suggest that you carry a map on every run, even if you know your route like the back of your hand. Look at the features in the same scale of your upcoming race and visualize the terrain before your run. This reinforces the scale of features and distance.

There are too many pieces of the puzzle to list and explain here. Maybe others could take one aspect and expound a little. I'm sure it is already out there on one blog or another. Drop a few links. I like Spike's at:
http://okansas.blogspot.com/ His go back to March of 2002. Others could point you to hundreds more.

I still have a huge amount to learn about orienteering but I can say this for sure, you MUST force yourself to practice navigation to see improvement. Practicing your nav is just as important as hitting the roads and rivers for the athletic training. Every time you work through an interesting nav problem, maintain your location on your map while on the run or even make a decision poorly based on too little information, you reinforce and improve your own navigation techniques.

I can look back at past races and meets and easily point to incidents where I missed or ignored pertinent information. I have to ask myself if it was a lack of focus or was it a lack of training to focus. Focus and sound decision making are both elements that must be practiced for perfection in sport.

Some things I've learned over 11 years of AR (but note: I've long since given up on being perfect):

- trust natural features
- distrust man made features
- it will be the old road that is shown on the map, not the new one you're standing on
- get to know what the local road symbols (gravel, dirt, paved) symbols look like on the ground
- learn when to hand the maps off to a competent teammate
- water can be the most difficult due to map handling, nighttime, and difficulty in translating scale
- prep your maps with as much information to eliminate having to "think" at 3am
- talk the course out loud to your teammates to keep you all focused
- race your race
- stay fueled and healthy
- make your decisions on what you know vs. what you "guess" you know. This is a topic in itself and one in which I've spoken to course setters about in discussing course "fairness".

and if all else fails...

-you haven't gone far enough

What can you do this winter to tone your skills? Go backcountry skiing.

Here's a story I wrote on that subject a couple years ago in my blog. (See 12/17 entry if it doesn't go right to it).

Although the basic skills necessary are the same I think navigation in adventure races (and I'm talking 24 hour plus events) is very different from shorter orienteering events. You are dealing with many features that will not show up on your map either due to scale or due to age of the map.

The best thing you can do is practice as much as you can on bigger maps. Longer rogaines are good alternatives to AR events. You can also develop more of a comfort level dealing with larger scales by spending more time in the backcountry with a map - I used to set up training bushwhacks. Urthbuoy is right about backcountry skiing since you rarely are following a trail so you get good at recognizing what drainage you are in, etc..

The other thing to remember about AR is that for most races route finding is more important than navigation (especially out west). You are usually picking very obvious attackpoints or have big catching features and how you get there the most efficiently is going to have the biggest influence on your placing.

Final piece of advice has already been said but it bears repeating... you've never gone as far as you think you have:)

an additional bullet item for urthbuoy's excellent list:

- Develop a 'misplaced cp strategy' ahead of time. I think there's been a misplaced cp at every long AR I've done. You can waste a lot of time looking for a misplaced control, especially at night. Waiting until you're tired and in a hurry won't improve your situation.