Discussion: So you say you want to get better?

Then if you missed them, check out the comments from Oct 12 in Sandra's training log. There are some very useful tips, advice, and ideas there from the guru, zen master, free swingin' Cyclops himself. See also Oct 16. Your chance to benefit from someone who *really* understands what orienteering racing is all about.

Hello all. this is Annabel (former SDO member) writing from BArcelona. I don't read this web site very often, but today I found this interesting subject (not that the others are not interesting ;-)) and I would like to add some comments to it.Thanks, Sandra, for putting these interesting questions on the table and thanks, Peter, for your answers.

In agreement with what you say, Peter, when one analyzes the routes of elit orienteers, the first thing one realizes is how simple their routes are. when I started orienteering, I thought that good orienteers where those who were able to execute very complicated routes. well, maybe that's still true. But what makes them so much faster (appart from their physical capabilities) is their very good simplification skills. they pick the relevant features among an ocean of data and they don't spend that much time analyzing everything, unless it's absolutely required for a certain leg. they also follow lots of handrails that are nothing else but contour lines. In other words, they don't move faster only because they run faster, the fact of picking the right things makes them save a lot of time.

Now, the problem is when one exceeds in simplification, right? ;-) I experience this myself very often. then my chances of making mistakes increases, eg. mistakes in parallel. As Peter said, checking the compass and using handrails often can help us avoid these mistakes. But I would stress that during simplification, we have to somehow "keep an eye on the danger". the danger of initiating a mistake, I mean. I think orienteers that have practiced this sport since they were kids have better automatized the rules of safety. but i also think it's very easy to introduce this idea in training. when executing a certain leg, don't only pay attention to those features that you have decided to rely on, also try to be aware of the presence of sources of mistake. of course, what might be a danger of mistake for me, may not be a problem for another person, this is why we need to know ourselves as much as possible ;-).

And then the relocation. Many times we train as if we are not supposed to make mistakes. and of course, the aim is to go for a clean run. But then we go out there in a competition and we do make some mistakes. I am myself a disaster at relocating and i understand that if i was better at it, it would help minimize those errors. Maybe we can now start a new discussion about methods to efficiently improve our relocation ???

Best regards and hugs to all of you,
Annabel

Sandra, next experiment you do could be to measure concentration or reaction times at varying levels of physical effort.

I'd be very interested to see where the changes occur.

And changes may not (?) happen at the same intensity levels for pure reaction (e.g. press a button) as for reactions involving a simple decision/caclutation (3+5=?)

best wishes,
neil
ps maybe i had a nice almost spotlessly clean run in the classic Because I was knackered and couldn't run fast. hmmm...

Nah, someone was magically pushing you in the right direction from behind. :)

I think that Annabel missed just one A-final this year at WOC and the World Cup Final.

damn, I thought she was invincible.

and normally i run like hell in any direction i can find if someone pushes me "magically" from behind. trust you to try taking advantage of my lack of fitness

Regarding Sandra's mistake #2 (previous discussion - not understanding the map...), there is something I always wonder about... wonder if anybody else ever feels that way, but there are certain maps that no matter how slow or how fast I go, and no matter how tired or awake I feel that day, I just don't get them. I sometimes think that mapping is such an art, and that different artists have such a different vision that sometimes I just don't share their own vision. In other words, the way they have mapped something doens't refer to the right thing in my head - it just looks very different than anticipated, and I get very confused or make a mistake.
In a way it does make sense, especially for areas where the base nap was iffy and most of the map made at the mapper's discretion. You have to interpret somebody else's vision and you may just miss it and simply not "connect" with the mapper.
Anybody else ever experience that, or is it just the fact that I'm left-handed (and have a Barbie brain?!)

As a fellow leftie, I definitely have to agree with Barbie. I've experienced maps which I cannot understand no matter what (Fallen Leaf in CA comes to mind), and I also have wondered if that has to do with the mapping style and if it's something that just takes time to get used to.

Nah. Fallen Leaf was just a crappy map.

Fallen Leaf is/was a pretty darn accurate map. Of non-orienteerable terrain. No matter how you map that terrain, the result will be unsuitable for orienteering. There seems to be a lot of terrain like that out west.

There are places where Fallen Leaf is not mapped very well, but I've seen much worse. The real failing was the course setting. I'm certain that courses could be set there that would be much better than the ones at the US Champs*. Another map that I was convinced was useless terrain is Four Mile Circle (often referred to as Pakim Pond), in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I ran Red at a one-day A-meet there in 1988, and not only was the course terrible, I couldn't see any way to do better. I was completely baffled as to why anyone would have wanted to map that place. So when they had a two-day A-meet there a couple of years later, I didn't even consider going. The course setter for the latter meet was Graeme Ackland, and by all accounts, the courses were terrific. I've never seen the courses, and to this day I can't figure out what Graeme could possibly have done, but I tip my hat to him.

*This brings up the Steve Tarry adage, "If the map is bad, blame the setter; if the course is too easy, blame the mapper".

Is that Graeme Ackland of pack formation simulation fame?

Yes, that's him. Splendid fellow, and quite talented.

Another DVOA alum.

I have to agree with Barbie that some maps are much trickier than others for me - and in some cases the opposite occurs - Mt. Pinos is the most striking example where I can just look at the map, then look at the ground, and say - this is exactly right. The contours in particular there just seem to be exactly where they should be - even though I can tell, in some cases, that they aren't engineering-precise, I can tell that it just looks right. But that's not true for everyone who reads that map.

BTW, I've done a bit of mapping here and there, and I agree with Peter, that helps a lot technically. Even if you just get an aerial photo (e.g. ala Google) of your local park, and (freely downloadable) OCAD 6, and then read the help and try to turn that into a map, you'll have to think about many things you don't have to when you run, and it can help when you run.

As for Fallen Leaf Lake, I think Vlad & JJ have got it right. After the race, I thought a bit about how I might try to map that better, but I think the terrain there is really tough to map. The vegetation type and densitiy vary with fractally pockets of thick and thin. The seems extremely hard to map well (although I'd love to be proven wrong...) In general, things on the map were on the ground, in the right place, but certainly not everything on the ground was on the map. In part, perhaps due to the difficult-to-map nature of the vegetation (and some other terrain features), the mapping standard didn't feel especially uniform.
This is somewhat related to what Peter G. was saying about practicing map-to-terrain and terrain-to-map visuallization both-directions. At Fallen Leaf Lake, I figured out that map-to-terrian kinda worked, and terrain-to-map didn't work well at all (because there are so many ways to map things like the vegetation.) Relocation was very challenging beause terrain-to-map visualization was quite unlikely to result in something exactly like the map. Map-to-terrain visualization, plus compass-pace to confirm that some approximate terrain feature matched the terrain visualizaiton worked well.
And, to JJ's point, the course setting could have been much better, along the lines of the Tarry adage.

Wyatt, what about the Willows map? :) If ever there was a rip in the space-time continuum put down on paper, that map would be it! Sometimes it took tens of minutes to traverse a dozen meters and other times I nearly reached the speed of light. One thing's for sure though: when I finished I didn't feel any younger than when I started. What was used as the base for that anyways?

I liked the description I heard (can't remember by who, maybe Wyatt): when considering the trail network, the Willows map was topologically correct. There was definitely some "rubber sheet" geometry going on.

Time to compile "mappers" black list - check who mapped Fallen Leaf Lake, Burton creek, and sim. maps. Or the best example was last weekend BAOC A-meet - part was done by Zerdev, where I was very comfortable, and the other part by Krivokopic, where navigation was kind of mistical.

That doesn't seem very fair given the conclusion a few posts up that it is the course setter (and the club that selects the terrain) who is responsible for unsatisfactory courses. The mapper maps what he/she is paid to map.

And the sanctioning committee to some degree.

The point of the adage is that, from the competitor's point of view, if the shortcomings of the map get in your way, then it's the course setter's fault for putting controls in poorly chosen places. A course setter doing his job properly will dumb down the courses if necessary, in order to use stuff that the mapping will support. You can set reasonable and fair courses on a USGS map, but they'll have to use really prominent features and be not too technical. The course setter, on the other hand, is definitely free to blame the mapper for doing a crappy job if that's the case.

Fallen Leaf Lake had a number of problems, but the biggest one (and it may have been Peter Gagarin who pointed this out) was that every single flag out there was misplaced. By about two meters. Vertically.

I agree that it would be worth sharing information on mapper quality (here or on the OMap list). Mapping quality varies (a lot).

I had the impression on Fallen Leaf that a lot of what the mapper did was colour in the basemap. So some places were accurate where features were on the basemap, and where the basemap wasn't as good, stuff often just got left off.

But I agree that the major problem was hiding controls to the degree that they could not be navigated to reliably. I attacked one control a few times from nearby distinct attack points, coming back to the identical spot, but the control was some meters away hidden beneath the bushes. The way to find it was to be lucky or to rumage through the bushes. (Or to go for an aerial view from a nearby hillside or tree.) I think that this precisely is what the Tarry quote says: the course setter must set the course so that controls can be found using the map. If bushes or weak mapping mean that the competitor has to hunt despite navigating accurately, then the course setter has failed. A bad map might mean that the controls all need to be on trail junctions or large hilltops in order to meet this criteria, but that's the right thing to do then. (Hence the second part of the maxim.) At Fallen Leaf, controls were certainly at the same height as at our events in Alberta. But that's not what counts. Here in Alberta, the forest has better visibility than Fallen Leaf. So, the Fallen Leaf controls should either have been higher, or (since the latter may not be so easy to do) been set in places where they were visible from more than two meters.

Fallen Leaf map's history is more complicated. It was mapped initially by one mapper, than his job was found absolutly unsatisfactory and map not usable. After that, second mapper completed/remapped area.
Actually, western part of the map is mapped way better than eastern. At least part used by BAOC in June of 2004.

div, Do you know exactly which parts of Joe Grant were mapped by who? I'd be curious to look over my courses with that in mind.
Was day two all Zherdev?

Zherdev maps vegetation boundaries with dots.

For those of you wondering if we've made progress or not, I've posted the maps from the 1974-75 U.S. Champs in Carbondale, IL. I don't remember any complaints about the maps. In fact, I think we were delighted to have such fine maps, in color even!

I didn't see much quality difference between the Zherdev and Krivokapic mapping at Joe Grant North, and only a slight style difference.

Joe Grant North-
I didn't notice this at first glance, but when Vlad Zh proudly pointed out to me the difference in drafting quality (contour spacing and smoothness), I have to say the difference was very apparent.

Fallen Leaf, eastern section, the area of the absolutely misplaced pit control-
I hired a very capable pace counter, my brother, living nearby in Sacramento, to check out this area. His photo- documented sketch map of the area not only confirmed the misplacement, (it was probably not even on a mapped pit) but to my surprise showed that this section of the map was dramatically distorted in geometry.

I didn't even suspect this, but it might explain how some people would get the flag in the wrong place if they applied precise compass or pace to set the flag in this impressionistic map setting. The content (selection of detail) was probably OK, but accuracy matters also. This distorted geometry was surprising to me given the relatively open forest in this section that I expect would have yeilded some structure (trails or veg details) on the base map.

Ivar Helgesen, the base mapper, told me that the Fallen Leaf base map was OK, but similar to a Norwegian standard, compromised slightly by the scattered evergreen forest. US base maps in hardwood forest are superior given similar photo quality.

I heard that Dan Stoll Hadayia set some fun courses at Fallen Leaf Lake a couple of years after the US Champs (just to reemphasize that a course setter can have a big impact on the fun factor).

"just to reemphasize that a course setter can have a big impact on the fun factor"

Yeah, that's why you hired kick-ass Canadian course consultants for the US champs right?

Right!

Just to be sure, you're talking about Fallen Leaf Lake, right?

Smart ass!

Different US Champs. Barbie is talking about the US Champs a couple of months ago in Oregon. I asked Barbie and Ted de St. Croix (my Canadian course consultants) to look over the courses. Mark Dominie also gave us feedback.

I'm going to start a new topic on meet quality.

Without dropping names, didn't the FLL champs also have a Canuck in a very prominent course role?

Affirmative.

Maybe BAOC went low budget?

no way