Discussion: Best Advice?

What is the best advice you have ever recieved? Something that you wish you would have known early in your career? Something you discovered on your own---that made racing/training a whole lot "easier?"

Being new to the sport I want to gather as much info as I can, and I realize that TRIAL BY FIRE IS GREAT.. But I want to hear from all you experts...

THANKS A TON!!!

# 1 Take one whole day off each week. I think if I had done this when I was younger I would not have been injured so much. #2 is have only a few goal races the rest are for training. The goal races are a full effort were as the training ones you want to back off your effort level.

I guess advices can suddenly become important at a moment you wouldn't have expected. Sometimes people give you simple advices, which do not mean a lot for you, and after some weeks, some months of even years, at a precise moment, it becomes THE advice for this precise situation... Am I right? When I was a bit younger I used to write down every advice I was given in a book and this appeared to be very useful. Here's already an advice;-)

But I think the most relevant advice I ever received was this one: In orienteering, EVERYTHING has to be conscious. (ex.: even if you are deconcentrated, you have to be conscious of it)...

Ljus - I like that one! It's very true.

Peter Gagarin once said the following to me in an email:

"Orienteering (and also running, though in a different way), takes a long, long time to get good at, and sometimes it can be a very humbling sport even when you think you’ve got it. On the other hand, that also means that you can enjoy the process of improvement for a long time as well."

And although I have received a lot of very good advice throughout the last few years (I've been very lucky in this sense), this is the thought that keeps coming back to me over and over again.

An old adage goes: "You can train twice as hard as you think; ten times harder than your mother thinks." I literally put that into practice in my mid 20's, raising my training from around 10 hours a week to 20-25/wk. No injuries, no burnout, and landed a spot on a semi-pro cycling team. Of course, to pull that off, I had to quit working which led to a rather hand-to-mouth existance. That brings up another old saw: "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

When sun come early and you the antelope, you better be runnin. Lion gonna wake up soon and gonna be hungry.

Visualize what you are expecting to see: reading for where you are headed more than where you are (still keeping 'in contact' and checking off features-- but that is easier to do because you are anticipating them or can recognize them with a glance).

Also, listen to your 'gut' instict too. When something doesn't feel quite right, look at your map.

Some good advice I received from coaches long before I'd ever tried orienteering:

"Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice does."

and

"A good athlete never blames her equipment."

Both are really simple ideas but I wouldn't want to forget them.

ALL GREAT WORDS OF WISDOM! Thank you!!!!