Discussion: Advanced Route Choice Making - Learning Materials Needed

As all of us, I’m always looking to improve my route choice making skills and am looking for resources on advanced route choice making. There is a ton of “tribal knowledge” out there – forums, sites, etc. however I’ve yet to encounter a book, presentation, an elaborative article or syllabus that would cover that in structured manner: How do advanced/elite orienteers analyze a leg (prior to executing it) and determine what is the best route choice to make? Is there a structured way to analyze a leg and determine what is the best route? What is the “algorithm” to use? surprisingly, a few elite orienteers that I spoke with over the years, find that process intuitive and instinctive and have never learned that in a structured way just out of their and others experience of many years of orienteering.

Obviously, individual parameters and preferences come into play however I bet that someone, somewhere came up with a book or presentation on the guidelines and “rules of thumb” that the masses can use (based on his/her best judgement of course). These kind of resources is what I'm looking for. Just to be clear - I’m not looking for materials on basic O-techniques: using attack points, catching features, aiming off, etc. There is abundance of these materials anywhere.

In addition to the above, I’m looking for sites that would analyze legs and talk about the process – worldofo and the Route to O-Season series have been great resources, especially when there is an elaboration on the considerations that orienteers have taken into account.

I'd appreciate your help - there must be something out there!

You should contact my brother Knut, he was "coach of the year" a few years ago, and I know he created quite a few route choice exercises.

Send me an email terje.mathisen (a) tmsw.no and I'll forward it.

I was fascinated by Knut's BLUE MOSS – VIRUS – LEGO – COCOS - ICE - O=PI(pdf) when I first saw it. It's in Norwegian but probably worth running it through google translate.

Are you suggesting there's more?

Aviad, I have a couple of route choice articles that may be of interest. Send me an email and I will send them to you

I'm sure he has more, I'll try to point him at this discussion...

Ixnay on the oogleGay ranslatetay

"The page you requested was too large to translate.
http://www.o-norge.no/wordpress/wp-content/uploads...;

Would people be willing to post any of those articles (in English) in this thread? I would love to see them and probably many on attackpoint as well.

o-maps: You should be able to split the article into page-sized parts that you put on your web servers, then you can ask google to translate each of them. It is a bit much for me to quickly translate. :-(

It would likely take me even longer to translate (my Norwegian is not as good as Terje's English!) but here's a teaser from page 11, on comparing routechoices (the C in ICE):

"Consider a typical leg on an o-course that takes 100 seconds. This corresponds to a leg of 333m in normal, white forest with an average speed of 3.33 m/s or 5min/km. Can you "see" how long the around-routechoices are in the pictures below? Distance evaluation is an important basic skill in orienteering! But do we train for this consciously and specifically? Unfortunately, I believe the answer is no, but I would be pleasantly surprised if some of our many o-talents mastered it. Maybe the ones who are best at this are those who do ski-o or mtb-o?"



I have left out the answers so that people can give it a try. If the straight line is 100 units, how many units are the around choices?

Here's the full document translated by google:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rYolAt3EIcE4uS...

The exercise Cristina posted could also use one or two that zigzag across the straight line (maybe that's in another example).

Yes!!! You guys are totally on point! Terje, Niels, Cristina - thank you so much!

If anyone else has more materials, please add to this thread, send me an e-mail (click on my name) or let me know how to contact you.

Will be going over this over the long weekend.

The auto-translated paper is still readable, but could obviously be improved in several places:
Tip 2: Exercise consciously and regularly running fast downhill. The reason for this is that time is at a distance in all endurance sports becomes best if the intensity or pulse is kept as constant as possible. And that again means that we have to hold back a little in the back and drop down properly. Other nations including Switzerland have emphasized this for a long time, while in Norway we have preferably done the opposite! There is no point jerking in the opposite directions, at least not as long as it is in an individual competition interval start.

Better: Train regularly on fast downhill running. In all endurance sports, the minimum/best time is achieved when the effort (ie. pulse rate) is kept as constant as possible. This means that we have to reduce speed in the uphill parts and speed up going downhill. Other nations including Switzerland have emphasized this for a long time, while in Norway we have preferably done the opposite! There is no point in attacking the climbs with maximum effort, at least not in an individual competition with interval start.

I.e. not bad at all from Google even though Norwegian is far from a priority language for them. :-)

I had to work at reading the translation, but it repaid the effort. Thank you Knut and Mark.

Knut called me today, he hadn't gotten any of my emails but I told him about the translation effort and I believe he's lurking and reading all your comments now. :-)

He did state that he considered writing a book about this stuff, I hope he does!

Thank you Terje! I look forward to that.

Anyone else has interesting stuff?

thanks, this is an excellent resource.

Yes, thanks for posting!