Discussion: Good enough to sort out a bad map or a badly set control...

Thought of this in relation to the map quality discussion between orienteering and rogaining.

I'm just getting to the point of where I can be confident of where I am in relation to the map and the control. I'm seeing multiple features and items on the map that give me that reassurance that yes, I'm in the right spot, and the planned attack is good.

I'm still in awe of those that can either:
a) keep that all going in spite of a difference between what the map says and what the reality on the ground is.
or
b) pick out the control that isn't where the map indicates it should be.

at speed

So that's a set of different rules that apply that say "ok, the map or control location isn't right, and I know how and why, and here's what I should do about it"...

Now - this is probably a skill developed back in the day when maps were not right more often, and us namby-pamby kids in the sport don't know how good we have it;-)

And sure, I can understand and accept set-backs when after an event the clues suggest that I failed for good reason - but you don't see those in the top of the field getting slowed down by more than a few seconds dealing with the same situation.

Is there a different "mode" to switch into, or is it an even greater awareness of terrain, map, and past history of how things typically happen?

Excellent question ccsteve! Yes the top orienteers always seem to finish at the top, while the rest of us are debating the fine points of control placement and mapping to excuse our laggardly performance.

I've even found streamers hanging alone on the designated control feature, while the flags were mishung some distance away...but that didn't seem to cause a problem for the best. How do they consistently do it?

Back in the day there used to be clinic sessions devoted to the subject of finding 'mis-hung' controls. The techniques involved checking the map for similar features and/or trying to guess from which direction would the flag placer have come. The thinking was that the control placer would have come to a feature with the right description but short of the right location. There might be other techniques that others can remember but here in Ottawa those skills have fallen out of practice.

Another technique is to have the course cancelled.

Nah, to do that you have to be prepared to prove that the control is misplaced and you have to fork out a fee to protest. Easier just to go find the sucker.

Experience. Run in more local events with minimal organising crew and often less experienced setters. As suggested in the initial post - you hit the right feature, no flag, a few seconds to confirm, visit likely nearby suspects, continue on. Still good fun, local low key event, it happens. Leads to better coping skills later - unless spoiled through ones early years.

Practice setting courses yourself might help, too.

I got used to this to a degree back in the day when we copied our own course from a master map by hand and on the clock. After drawing my own control circle on the wrong feature for a third week in a row, I recovered and found the correct feature pretty quickly :)

If I am sure the control is not where I am, and I will confirm that from nearby features as quickly as I can, I just move on. I see no point in finding a control which is not on my course.
I think what slows many down, including myself, if the control does not show up, is that you are not totally confident of where you are. This is the big difference with the best o'ers, they are sure of their placement on the map, they have come off the attackpoint and KNOW they are at the correct feature.
At that point one can choose to go search for it in likely places, or just run on.

On the other hand, being at the right feature does not always guarantee that you'll be able to see the control right away. It might not be (grossly) misplaced, it might just be behind a bush, or on the wrong side of the feature, or have fallen down, or be faded...

This is apparently not how you do it :-)

Hey!

Shouldn't you be...I dunno, off riding your bike or nursing a hangover, tRicky?

ps. It's a good thing I never delete anything, hey? :p~

Surely tRicky's done a few better otm efforts?

On leg 1?

I was telling everyone how you relocate onto an incorrectly placed control!

Anyway I only have a very mild hangover, which probably doesn't even qualify as one. More airline hilariousness - Finnair cancelled my ticket home after I didn't board my original flight from Hong Kong to Helsinki... which they changed when it all got too hard for them! Idiots. Now I'm stuck in Tallinn for a bit longer.

I've run well over 2000 competitions over 45+ years as an orienteer, and I tend to be one of those guys who lose a lot of time when the map is wrong or a flag is misplaced. :-(

One of my age group competitors (Trond Rønneberg, check his map archive!) managed one of the most amazing feats of orienteering many, many years ago, on a map near Hamar in Norway:

This was a selection race for an international event, so a lot was riding on the results, and the area chosen is (in)famous for being the bottom of an old glacier, i.e. nearly flat and sandy but with intricate single-contour positive and negative details and a few thousand boulders sprinkled over the map. (Did I mention the forest cover? Low pine dense enough to severely limit visibility.)

One of the controls was missing and a couple of competitors were trying to check out nearby (almost identical) details when Trond was observed running into the control depression, looking around for about 2 seconds, then proclaim that "The control is missing" and run on to the next. :-)

In terms of recognizing map errors, not all features on the map are equally reliable. As a rule of thumb, vegetation and small trails can vary widely over time, while contour features tend to be more stable. But this all depends on terrain, map age, mapping technology, etc... It takes experience to figure these things out. In general, it's best to base your navigation off of big, reliable features, and use the smaller (generally less reliable) features for confirmation of location and fine positioning.

As you build skills, greater awareness will come. When I get comfortable with a map by learning to identify the useful details and tune out the irrelevant, I get a powerful sensation that my circle of awareness is enlarging... I can start to process the most important information within 100 or 200 meters of me, instead of just 40 or 50 meters.

When you're absolutely confident that you're running through saddle X, and headed toward hill Y with the large patch of trees you can see on the north side, then you don't have to freak out if tree Z is missing along the way. Maybe somebody cut it down last year. It can still be worth the effort to check these smaller features off though... especially if they are near your line, and you can use them to confirm you're running a clean line. Each time you notice tree Z is missing, you should make a mental note. At the very least, this helps you refine your idea of how reliable/visible different features are on this part of the map... (maybe later, one of these little features will be all you have available to work with, and if you've been having trouble checking those features off, you'll want to know that). But if it's happening frequently, you also take it as a warning to double check your technique... you might be making some systematic errors in technique or map interpretation. If I'm sensing map issues, I generally take it as a warning to slow down a bit and begin rechecking my internal calibrations for things like direction and distance. Even if my technique is sound, it's probably not a bad idea to slow down a bit and focus on fundamentals when the map is poor.

BTW. I'd say that modern, hyper-detailed maps give you more opportunities to check this skill than the old, less accurate maps. More features along the line means more opportunities for little mapping discrepancies to occur, and more redundant information so you can properly diagnose the discrepancies.

One of my pet peeves was hidden controls at the right feature. It does not mean that control needs to be visible from far but once you get to the feature it should be visible and I should not be required to run around the feature to find where it is hidden. It felt like a mini-lottery if I happen to approach control from the right angle I would get it right away but if not - search mission is on.

agree with Gil. the goal is to find the correct feature (or part thereof as described on the map and by the description), the flag is just confirmation, not the goal in itself. Though I have to admit that's not the way I consciously think of it while racing, it's the way I try to think about control placement while setting.

To relate that to the original question, try to get along to low key training sessions where there may just be a streamer if anything marking the control feature, or do course setting, where of course there's nothing marking the feature until you put it there. As well as emphasising "navigation to the feature" rather than "to the flag", it will also be potentially good practice of the "elimination" techniques useful to find the right feature among similar terrain and/or relocating in the control circle - things I find useful even if all the flags are in the right place, because far too often, I'm not!

When I first lived in the US, I remember being in total awe of EricW's ability to find controls in the wrong place, or where the map was quite wrong. I still am, and I tend to lose more time than others to poor mapping.
I think the reason is that my "style" involves mapreading to the control. The real elites probably pick up more detail from the map (including absence of detail), but also have distance judgement and compasswork as an independent way to find the flags. So if Plan A fails due to iffy mapping, Plan B kicks in automatically. Having experience of the mapper and setter's style helps, recognising the different ways an area might be mapped. Also, whether the feature is unique, or if there are likely to be many smaller, similar, unmapped features about. Some of this experience is garnered on the early part of the course.

And of course, being 100% sure that you *are* where you think you are, even if the flag isnt.

Tero's definitive work on this subject. Note the "16 Mappers; 16 Maps" display, and the evolution of a map between 1982 and 2005. Perhaps this is why flags are mishung...and many of us are a bit uncertain when they are?

I'm partly surprised to see my name come up in this context, (but thanks Graeme)since I never felt good at this compared to PG, who was clearly my role model on dealing with crap situations, which were much more common in the pre-Graeme days.

Yes, as others have mentioned, the common thread seems to be simply experience in mapreading, primarily, and map making and course setting to a secondary degree. The oft-mentioned confidence is the result of experience, not a causal, or self-created factor.

Another aspect, that hasn't been mentioned here is one's emotional/psychological reaction to a crap situation. Does it derail the rest of the course, or is it simply a temporary distraction. I guess this improves with experience as well, at least the ability to hold off anger until after the finish line, which I managed to do, sometimes, but I admit this subject still elevates my blood pressure, decades later.

I think navigational technique can be broken down into map reading RELATIVE to details, and map reading in the ABSOLUTE sense independent of details, but cognizant of the big picture XYZ coordinates, which includes direction, distance, change of elevation, and angle to the contours. I think this aspect is easy to overlook, since it is less interesting.

I'll suggest that simply careful thumbing technique can provide a critical connection betweeen these two skills. The less experienced RELATIVE orienteer , will quickly displace themselves trying to match up features, but attentive thumbing will at least keep you in the correct section of the map, relative to the major features.

And yes, Tero has pushed the limits of navigational excellence, at least in the verbal and graphic mediums, but I think it is important to understand that before one moves on to his simplification concepts, it is essential to be excellent in underlying navigational skills. Remember, before his "breakthrough", he was already able to run a technically perfect WOC race in very technical Finnish terrain. Simplification without relative and absolute skills, will save seconds on a couple controls, but geometrically multiply the mistake time on many more. I can say this from first hand experience in the pre-Graeme years.

To answer original question - elites become elites because they train more and/or smarter than others. When I was trying to make in this sport I was lucky enough being able to train with the map 3-4 times per week on average, sometimes even more. Eventually my skills became better and better and it became second nature to notice mapping issues or instantly determining that flat is in the wrong place.

In that regard orienteering is no different than any other skill sport - more you train better you become and eventually you can do things that regular folks can only marvel about. For example I am sure that most golfers are aware of mechanics of perfect golf shot. However knowing mechanics will not help the game - practicing will.

Once I heard former Superbike champ explaining things he does when he is taking a corner at high speeds. When you watch it live it happens in less than second. However former champ was explaining all the intricacies for good 5 minutes - body position, clutch work, front breaks, read breaks, accelerator - how much of each component to use at different stages of particular corner - I was blown away about the complexity of what seemed such a simple thing on TV. However I don't think you are born to be superbike racer. You cane become one with lots of determination and lots of practice.

Thanks Eric for your mention of absolute skills. I would add parallel processing of multiple channels (sorry I have no succint name for this): a navigator who is able to deal with an incomplete map absorbs information from several streams, such as contours, vegetation, trails, and possibly hydrography, and is able to put relative weights on the validity of these streams and discard the one(s) that make sense less than others. This is an indispensable skill (along with absolute navigation) if you want to successfully navigate a rogaine using a government map. An orienteer would just say "rogaine maps are crap" and quit, but we've had World Championships as recently as 2010 on a government map and nobody questioned the validity of the top placings.

"Multitasking"?

Some O maps can be crap too.

T/D orienteers know that rogaine maps are crap, yet they still do them, and still win rogaines. Because they know the maps are crap, their navigation takes this into account. If they want to go orienteering, ie navigate on a (hopefully) good map, they would go to an orienteering event.

The less accurate the map, the more luck is involved. An inaccurate map gives the strong runner/weak navigator an advantage over the weak runner/strong navigator.
Many of us have been in both of these situations over the course of an orienteering career. Young and dumb, I preferred the USGS maps and struggled with those detailed O maps. Now in the opposite situation, an event on a USGS map is unappealing.

I'm not sure that an inaccurate map gives the strong runner/weak navigator an advantage over the weak runner/strong navigator. I think it does interject a greater element of luck and/or demands a different skill set... one that I don't care to personally develop, but I don't begrudge those who do.

There is difference between incomplete and erroneous maps. Incomplete map usully gives advantage to strong navigators, they know what they are doing and will not get confused for some unmapped stuff or if something has changed a bit or if an apple logo shaped knoll is not mapped with apple logo but just as a round knoll. But erroneous maps (mapped features/objects are misplaced) just introduces luck factor, about like misplaced controls.

Generalized incomplete maps are not crap and there is no that much luck factor threre IF flags can be seen well and far enough. If the way/how far flags can be seen is in par with the map generalization it is just fine.

Yes, I was talking about incomplete maps per Jagge, which do require a different skillset. Not about erroneous maps.

But an incomplete map can also be quite erroneous and detrimental to the navigator and advantageous to the fast runner. Two examples that are quite common on USGS maps:

1. An unmapped, impassable area, such as a deep gully or fight that is not evident until arriving there. (The fast runner/poor navigator already chose the longer trail route around.)

2. Generalized reentrants. A system of small reentrants appears as one large reentrant. (The fast runner can gain time by more quickly searching around to find the flag.)

I guess for rogaining you need better quality map than for orienteering. In O athletes are supposed to attack controls just from certain directions / attack points and handfull route choices will send them trough handfull of places and only those need to be somewhat correctly mapped, and if a place isn't quite up to standard you can change courses a bit or fix the map. In rogaining you can't know just like that how and where they will end up running and short cutting, so pretty much the whole maps should be about correct - makes it a lot harder to fix.

I agree with George's first point but not with the second. In a properly set rogaine (do as I say, not as I do), systems of small unmapped reentrants shouldn't be used for a CP; it's up to the course designer to work around the incompleteness of the map as much as possible. But, if such a system is not used to site a CP and is simply likely to be encountered on a course, then a good navigator with experience and skills of reading a generalized map will not be puzzled, whereas someone without such skills might.

The best thing to do about unmapped/impassable traps is to not have them; many rogaine areas fit the description. The next best thing is to mark as many of them on the map that are encountered during course setting as possible. A less radically posed and related problem is more subtle but noticeable difference in passability among different parts of the map; those rogainers, for example, who choose to head mostly west may be disadvantaged over those who head east. I'm not sure what to do about this, other than to say that the course should be set in such a way that at the top level, medal contenders should have to encounter all parts of the area. But it still makes medal competition in, say, Supervet category susceptible to the issue.

There's a difference between a map that is consistently incomplete (e.g. one that does not show slowness of vegetation at all) and one that is missing important information in specific areas (e.g. one that shows cliffs, but is missing large cliffs in one area). The latter is more problematic, as skilled navigators will think they can rely on the map, and can get unexpectedly caught. In the former case, at least you know you're taking a chance if you decide to leave the trails.

Makes sense. Guess meet organizers need to mention in the meet notes whether we are running on a consistently skanky map or an inconsistently skanky map.

A slightly modernized version of Thierrys presentation mentioned above. Most of the focus on (good) O maps, but some parts are applicable to any map...