Discussion: Spiking a control

The other day while field checking, I made a parallel error and was in the wrong stream valley, about 300 m off from my goal. When I realized my mistake, I went straight to the control, picking off a ton of features on the way, completely on contact for the last 300 m. I clearly made a bad mistake. My question is, though, does this constitute "spiking" the control? On the one hand, there was a big goof; on the other hand 300 m is longer than many normal "O" legs. So, does spiking a control mean came in to it perfectly? Or does it mean ran the entire leg error-free?

see also:
http://www.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/me...

The only thing I'd add to my comments from the original thread is that I think that the term is of limited usefullness because it covers too much. If I don't spike a control, why not? Was it a leg like that described above or did I get to the control circle fine and then blow the detail navigation?

I grade legs in three general areas: route, contact, and close. A good route is one that gives away little or no time to the optimal route or one that conciously trades time for something else (safety, physical recovery, etc.). Contact rates whether I was in contact with the map the entire leg. Close considers how cleanly I was in and out of the control circle.

A spike gets high marks on all three and a boom is a leg where at least one of these items was seriously deficient (usually involving a time loss of over a minute). The most interesting legs tend to be the ones left over. Most of the leg was good, but there was room for improvement.

I tend to use the "spike" statistic to track mistakes, rather than to measure genuine spikes. If I had a bad leg, I'll consider that not to be a spike, even if I then run straight onto the control. Tracking my number of mistakes week-in-week-out is a more useful metric for me.

By the way, in post-race analysis, I generally try to categorise the reasons for a bad leg as one or more of the following:
Navigational error
Map-reading error
Poor route choice
Parallel error
Poor pacing/scale awareness
Inverted contours
Contouring error
180 degree/90 degree error
Distraction
Hesitation
Fatigue
Unanticipated hazard
Poor attack point
Poor mapping
Bingo control

I think I encountered all of the above at least once last season...

Um, you forgot a few:
Followed the wrong person
Difficult to follow the person
Could not find a person to follow
Thorn/spike in foot
Bear/moose in path
Potty break

And one more:

Attack badger!

If I'm not mistaken, an encounter with an attack badger does not provide for a subsequent opportunity to do any analysis, so the concept of a reason for a bad leg has no meaning in that context. There's no way calculate how much time you lost when you're lying shredded in pieces across the prairie.