NZ Champs Mega-Post

Let’s see if this turns into a mega-post or not. I wanted to recap my performances at NZ Champs last weekend and also dive deeper into a few navigation concepts, so the chances are decent that this will be at least moderate in length.

I aim to focus on a few points that we can learn from as opposed to a broad rundown of my racing. This is not a Leg by Leg video.

Deviation Analysis: Question

Which of these routes from control 1 to control 2 is shortest and which is longest? Tips further down, don’t cheat.

Preparation

I’ve been running decently for 12 months since my long standing ITB issue subsided. I was doing minimal running over that 15 month period going back to December 2019 and lost a lot of soft tissue conditioning, most notably in my calves, and it’s taken an equally long time to get this conditioning back. Part of the issue was that my aerobic system was decently fit from cross training throughout 2020 and so my heart and lungs felt comfortable at running paces that my calves couldn’t handle. This lead to some yo-yo training for chunks of 2021. In early 2022 I did away with all tempo and interval training as I had figured out that these sessions were strongly linked to the frequent calf strains, peroneal strains, and Achilles tendonitis. Back to basics, back to base. And so since Oceania in January 2022, I’ve been on a training diet of only easy and steady training, plus some orienteering races. This was a good move and I received no more acute strains in 2022, and the Achilles tendonitis stabilised.

The only faster training I did was strides: 5 by 200 m strides with specific form focuses once a week. The goal with these is to ensure my legs can move fast and to pick up issues with mobility and range of motion, while avoiding the very high load on my tendons and muscles that comes with proper interval sessions.

So 90% of my training was slow, 10% was the odd orienteering race, and some uncountably small portion was strides. About a third of the slow 90% was done on the bike or elliptical trainer.

The Sprint

I’ve always been ok at sprint orienteering. The navigation is easy enough, but I tend to feel overconfident with the navigation, then move my attention to running harder, then discover I had not planned ahead enough and miss out on some better routes. This was basically the story of the NZ Champs sprint too. I made some small inefficiencies where I ran wider than I needed too, or took on a slow staircase that was easily avoidable.

I really enjoyed the course that we raced because there were a lot of irregular shapes in the terrain and there was no easy theme that could be applied to all legs. Each leg was different and routes had to be assessed closely and carefully. My performance was typical for me, 20ish seconds dropped across 4 small errors. I finished with the leading time, but was promptly pushed to 2nd and then 3rd by Tommy Hayes and the Joe Lynch. It looks like the seeding based on world ranking was accurate.

I’d like to move people’s attention to the map that was used for the race. The cartography is crisp and clean. Minimum gap sizes are adhered to and extra details have been omitted. It’s a map about what is passable, and what is not possible, nothing more.

The Middle

However, my race wasn’t perfect. I dropped 20 seconds with an indecisive exit from control 6. I changed my route mid leg because the rocky hillside ahead of me looked nasty, but I had already overrun the obvious track on the map that wasn’t actually so obvious in the terrain.

I had an admin error leaving 10 where I was navigating as if I was leaving 11. This was a very needless loss of 30 seconds. More on map admin errors in last month’s Nav Chat.

I also dropped 10 seconds with a bad route to 15 and then 20 seconds with a bad execution to my attackpoint. I ended up too high on the spur, but realised straight away and wasted no time getting through and out of the trees to attack the control from behind where it was most visible.

And the rest of the time I was just killing it in a straight line.

Lets take a look at some of my routes in terms of deviation. Do you recognise some of those shapes from my diagrams?

Deviation Analysis: Tips

Do these annotated dimensions help you come to an answer? Or said another way, do numbers as opposed to just visuals help you? The percentage is of the straight line distance. Scale does not matter, the correct answer will be true for a map at any scale.

The Long

I always have more confidence to win the long distance compared to the middle and sprint, although my record at NZ Champs has been poor with some very sad disappointments and a lot of close-fought podiums.

This year was a podium, and a sad one for me. Not because I believe the results are about a winner, closest losers and more losers – I don’t believe this at all! But rather, because I failed to lay down a performance that accurately reflects the work I’ve put in, and that is disappointing.

On this race I had a major gear malfunction. That is, my right shoe fell apart after 40 minutes. I was in a close battle for the lead at this point with favourite Joe Lynch and I tend to back myself over him as the races get longer. I was focused and feeling strong as in the previous day’s middle distance race, so while I was navigating humbly in the technical terrain, I was racing with a strong belief that I could win.

And that is when the outer sole of my shoe sheared off. At first just the heel area, so I wasn’t so concerned. But coming into control 11, jumping around and bashing through the wild beech forest, the outer sole came almost completely off, remaining attached by just a small section at the very front. It turns out this is dodgy when landing on uneven surfaces, but more importantly, it is very distracting. There is the distraction of having to consciously manoeuvre your foot differently, slipping frequently as the inner sole suddenly slides sideways out over the outer sole, and the thoughts around preventing it from getting worse and preparing for it to come completely off. My stress was not about finishing the race – I could finish in bare feet if I had to – it was about how I could maintain high speed in rough and stony terrain.

Anyway, you get the picture. And this has been my argument for many years now: Orienteering is a concentration game. And this weekend has backed up this idea so strongly in me. Once you know what the colours and symbols of an orienteering map mean, and assuming your vision is not preventing you from reading the colours and symbols, and once you know how to simplify the map for the given terrain type… Hmm, ok, so there some prerequisite skills and perhaps I just disproved my initial argument. But these abilities are all easy to test for and are all very solvable. And they are even mostly solvable from your living room.

These are all solved problems:

• Learn the colours and symbols on the ONZ coaching resource
• Listen to my podcast on sports vision and buy magnifying glasses or magnifiers that attach to your compass.
• Ask experienced orienteers where the fastest and safest running lines are in different terrain types and check out model maps when you have the chance. It typically takes a few runs in a certain type of terrain to get the hang of how to move easiest through the terrain. When you have figured this out, route planning should no longer be a guessing game.

But, back to my initial claim. Once you know what you are doing, the only thing separating you from your full potential is how much you are concentrating on the task at hand in the moment. Not getting distracted by other competitors, thoughts of grandeur, thoughts of self-doubt, thoughts of how tired you are, thoughts of how terrible the mapping is, or thoughts about the flapping, slipping, and dragging situation attached to your right foot.

So I sadly bled out for the rest of the race. Would I have beaten Joe? Probably not. He had a really good race and I also made 2 small route choice mistakes that I can’t blame on distractions.

For those also wondering what shoes I was wearing so that you can avoid buying some duds, it’s not quite that simple. I had, and still have, a small stash of Icebugs from when I was sponsored by them. I particularly liked the original Acceleritas and once the product was discontinued, I thought it best to preserve my precious stash by only using them for races. So despite being only moderately worn, they were at least 6 years old and it’s not a massive surprise that the adhesive would be deteriorating at that age. The learning here is to use shoes within 4 years. I will still be using Icebugs for most of my orienteering.

Here are some deviations from the long distance. It’s worth noting how little time I spend mucking around in these instances. I’m relocating on the fly, maintaining race pace, with a few small exceptions noted below.

Training Tip

Take a look at the split times on the legs you are making mistakes on. Where is the time loss coming from? Is it the extra distance you’ve covered or the amount of time you’ve spent standing around scratching your head? Maybe you’re walking because you are confused, or maybe running slower because your confidence is low, but are you relocating faster by moving slower? You have to relocate faster and if you are poking around for minutes on end you are not doing it right. Get high, get out, get to something distinct or to somewhere with good visibility. And do it fast.

The Relay

Fast sand dune pine forest, this is my jam and I executed well. I moved the NWOC A team from outside the podium to 2nd. I made a couple of small mistakes (see deviation below) and lost 20 seconds leaving the spectator control straight into a patch of dense forest. Why was I being dumb leaving the spectator control? I was thinking about how great I am for catching the Auckland OC and Nelson OC teams, I was thinking about how I was going to smash Brent Edwards on the last loop and that I backed myself over Jonty Oram in a sprint off. I was thinking about how to look good in front of the spectators. And all I really needed to think about was the next 4 legs on the map and how the obvious exit direction from 16 was left down the spur and not straight down the hill and into the dense trees like a muppet. Elite orienteering is a concentration game.

Here are two examples from the NZ Champs relay. One of a wide deviation which cost me an estimated 8 seconds compared to perfect execution and another of a directional miss (I saw the control to the side of me and so didn’t stop or slow down) that cost me 12 seconds compared to perfect execution. Let those sink in. Leg 1-2: 8 seconds, Leg 7-8: 12 seconds.

Deviation Analysis: Answers

Ok, so it’s a bit of a trick question, but hopefully it made you think hard. All black lines are the same length. They are all 20% longer than the straight line distance. Personally, I find the wide deviations like A and B, look longest, closely followed by F. D looks like the shortest to my eyes, with C and E in the middle. So I clearly have a bias here.

Consider how I lost so much time in the overshoot error to 15 in the long distance compared to all the other deviations in this post. It’s actually a massive error compared to the others, but doesn’t at first jump out as being 3 to 10 times larger than the others mentioned here.

Well, it did turn into a bit of a mega-post. I hope there is something in here for everyone.