* Lessons Learnt

Lessons Learnt

By Matt Ogden

Orienteering is a technical sport – a set of discrete, non-linear optimisation problems solved through skill, experience, and a robust technique, but ultimately undermined by fatigue, complacency, and inaccuracy.

In the pursuit of that non-existent perfect technical performance, we are inevitably going to deviate from the ideal route. This too tends to be the focus of our conversations after a race – “I lost 2 minutes on control 21”, rather than “I spiked the 20 other controls”. Or if you’re our Club Captain, often just missing a few controls while nailing everything else.

The Nationals Long Distance on a very technical map facilitated some truly great orienteering mistakes, three of which I thought would be appropriate to share in this coaching corner. I believe mistakes are necessary to improve our technique, as painful as they are sometimes, they do make us better orienteers if we learn from them.

Firstly, Gene on 4-5. Time loss 6’55. A result of a very challenging area and perhaps coming off the road at too high a speed without a really strong attack point. Read more about Genes Nationals campaign here with some interesting analyses and reflections.

The other two are from yours truly on 7-8 and 16-17. Time losses of 1’ and 5’18 respectively. My own personal Bermuda Triangle which I will leave to you to try and understand the comedy of errors that occurred.

Lesson learnt - a race is never over, if it’s demanding, then everyone will be having problems. If a mistake is made, it is important to re-start and continue, trying as best as possible to forget the mistake. A task much harder said than done, as I found out in the Nationals Long Distance.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to reflect on the legs which maybe didn’t go so well at Nationals. How could you have done the leg better to minimise the chances of making that mistake?

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