In Nav Chat #3: December 2020 I explained a method for analysing rogaine performance using the idea of points per minute. I shared some of my conclusions from my brief analysis but didn’t spend much time explaining how I prepared the numbers. So here I will go a little bit deeper.
In order to do this you will need a GPS recording of your rogaine, QuickRoute and Excel. I’ve done a quick tutorial on QuickRoute towards the end of this leg by Leg video: youtu.be/-WHGMjOzg64. I’m assuming a basic understanding of Windows and Excel when writing this.
- Import your GPS recording into QuickRoute and do the usual route adjusting so that it all looks pretty.
- Insert a lap point for each control. You will see the laps displaying on the right hand side panel as you insert the lap points.
- Copy the data from the side panel into excel. You get the option to do this if you right click anywhere in the table of numbers in the right hand side panel.
- Paste the data in an Excel spreadsheet.
- Tidy up the columns by removing all the unneeded ones. You really just want the split time between legs. Number them from start through to finish and delete the totals row at the bottom of the table if you like.
- Remove navigational errors. I made a 2 minute mistake on 10-11 and estimated the size of the mistake by looking closely at the GPS track on QuickRoute. Removing mistakes is important as we are interested in the typical time taken to do such a leg, not what ever antics you got up to on the day. This is obviously subjective and may require recalling the nature of the mistake to help guess the time you lost.
- Manually enter the number of points earned for each control in a column. These are the points per control.
- From points per control we can calculate the points per leg as the average of the points per controls on either end of the leg. The calculation looks like points per leg = (points from pervious control + points from next control) / 2. For example, the points per leg for leg 5-6 in my example is 50 points from control 5 + 30 points from control 6 divided by 2, (50 + 30)/2 = 40. Treat the start and finish as controls scoring 0 points.
- Divide points per leg by the split time for each leg (with mistakes removed).
- Now you have points per leg for each leg of the course which you can colour using conditional formatting if you like.
Here is the Excel file to help you: Points per minute
If you have taken the time to do this to a recent rogaine, whether it’s 90 minutes or 24 hours, get in touch and I’ll get you on the January episode of Nav Chat to discuss your findings.
