WSOC Mega Post

Here’s a look at my experience with World Schools Orienteering Championships in Estonia. In this longer that usual post I’ll take a look at my approach to preparing the athletes both in New Zealand and in Estonia, what we can learn from the results, and also how I capitalised on the opportunity to do my own training in the challenging terrain. Something for everyone. I’ll be referring to my DOMA (Digital orienteering map archive) often, and if you’re interested to see what orienteering training I do and how I perform in races then you should check it out.

The 3-Month Build

I got involved in coaching at WSOC through Diocesan School as their usual coach (my Dad) couldn’t make the trip to Europe. I was more than happy to take on the job as I know the Diocesan athletes fairly well and I’m also experienced in the particular terrain used for the championship as I spent 3 weeks there in 2017 for World Orienteering Championships. The Diocesan athletes would join a larger NZ cohort to cover senior and junior boys and girls. Dio covered the senior girls’ grade, St Cuthbert’s College the junior girls’ grade and Mt Albert Grammar covered both boys’ grades.

The training over the past 3 months saw more school students taking on serious orienteering training than I’ve ever seen before in Auckland. I mean getting into the forest on hard courses weekend after weekend. The navigation sessions I planned for the Dio athletes focused on strong direction skills because the Estonian terrain has a lot of undergrowth and fallen trees which push the athletes around a lot more than they are used to in Auckland. The physical training focused on terrain running because the undergrowth and soft ground is much slower and requires more aggression than the faster terrain in NZ.

Here are two of the orienteering training sessions we did:

Direction training:

1. Cover ups for overdriving compass attention.
2. Corridor for overdriving compass attention and forcing reading of finer details.
3. Inverse corridors to force side to side referencing and looking far.
4. Rough terrain with direction changes to practise some incorporation of the emphasised techniques into the athletes’ normal rhythm.

Race start training:

1. Race pace intervals to tune the athletes’ mental/emotional and technical starting routines.
2. Race pace intervals with route choice planning, to get the athletes more familiar with multitasking planning important future route choices and navigating the current leg.

Here is one of the important physical sessions, one hour running in the open dunes from Muriwai with knee-high to waist-high undergrowth and soft sand.

The Final Preparations

We had a tight turn around to get ready to hit the start line of World Schools with some experience in truly relevant terrain, though. We missed the relay at NZ Champs to get to Estonia with enough time for 4 sessions in the forest and a few easy/rest days. My plan in Estonia with this was to build the athletes’ orienteering up from scratch so that we could expose the expectations, habits, and intuitions that were not applicable to the Estonian terrain. A lot of our orienteering in Auckland is in one type of terrain and maps are made by just a handful of different mappers. The way the mappers in Estonia identify dense forest, clearings, marches, tracks and rides is all slightly different to what we are used to. We did a 2 hour map walk as our first session. We debated the mapping endlessly and did our best to calibrate our reading of the map to the reality of the terrain. There was a notable increase in confidence between the early parts and the latter parts of this exercise.

Next up we did a route choice training in groups of 3. We used the short legs to synchronise running intensities and the next long leg to test different options. The goal was to learn which routes were faster and and which were safer, and ultimately develop a better feel for comparing the runnability of different surfaces such as tracks, rides, forest, scattered trees and marches. This was also a nice progression into the terrain at running speed, after just walking for the previous day’s session.

It was then time to build some confidence at speed onto the foundation of confidence by using intervals to give athletes hard orienteering at race pace, without forcing a sustained effort. Picking up the pace forced everyone to focus on only the most significant features and find reliable ways to move through the terrain. Some athletes even ran head to head to further increase their reliance on only the most significant features. The discussions by all athletes after this session showed that the contours where far preferable for confident navigation than the vegetation and marches.

The final planned session was still technically demanding, but the focus was on the mental and emotional stress of starting a serious race. I planned a full race simulation with start list, quarantine, gear drop and silent start. This got the athletes used to some of the particular sources of stress in a championship race and helped them develop better habits to deal with them. The course was planned to be as similar in style to race day as I could predict, based on old maps of the competition area.

A short bonus session on the final day before racing was investigating the model map provided by the organisers. For us this was another chance to get into relevant terrain and get some final confidence before hitting the start line.  We didn’t learn anything new, but confirmed route choices would be based around linking together tracks, and contour features were the most consistently understandable features in the terrain. For many competitors from other countries, this was the only chance they got to set foot on relevant terrain.

Here is quick look at the terrain from the view of my sternum. This was representative of the middle distance race, but doesn’t feature any of the denser forest encountered in the long distance race.

Race Week

The first race was the long distance, albeit a short long. The route choices were as we practised and those that chose to use the tracks had reliable, consistent split times between controls. While I believe straighter was the fastest way for the top athletes, most NZ athletes benefited by minimising risk and choosing the safer options where available. The first 70% of the course was hard, but the last 30% was easy and overall the courses were underwhelmingly short. St Cuthberts’ Zara Stewart took out the Junior Girls grade, which I was blown away by. She really impressed me in the training week by her confidence with a map, but everything has to go perfectly on the day to win against some of the top Europeans.

After hearing from those who had less than satisfying races, I was reminded how important relocation strategies are. Based off split times, younger athletes tend to make longer mistakes, but after following the details of many mistakes closely, including GPS tracks, it’s hard to describe them as bigger mistakes than the ones I tend to make. The biggest difference is the decisiveness of the actions that I take after becoming unhinged. If there is nothing significant near me, I’ll move to find something significant quickly, with the same speed as I would anywhere during the race. Often I’m too quick too boost off, so there is a balance, but developing orienteers generally need to get out to a track or get high ASAP, and stop playing the hopeful “maybe it’s just over here” game.

The middle distance was set with a similar theme to the long. Hard start, easy towards the end and very short. The forest was faster though, and there were lots of ways to use the tracks to hold maximum speed. We had some mixed results again, but everyone had a good understanding of their performances. Zara was absolutely clean again, and won by a massive margin, with Sofia Toes also getting an outstanding 7^th in the same Junior Girls grade. Luke Clements from MAGS also had a storming run to get 5^th in the Junior Boys grade. He said he felt in control of the navigation and never had to stop for a significant time.

The junior girls team got themselves the win overall. This is very impressive against teams who are move experienced in this type of terrain. The junior boys also benefited from their consistency as a team and landed 3^rd place overall.

This has been a great event for taking some of our top school athletes through the whole process, starting by learning how to train for orienteering, learning how to prepare specifically for a one off event, and going through the process on race day. The organisation of the event was also very professional and it was tremendous fun to be a part of. But, I was a little disappointed in the racing that was provided. The races were underwhelmingly short, to help the less experienced end of the field get to the finish I assume. Which may be a net positive for the event as a whole, but still underwhelming for us. And only having 2 representative races makes for a brief encounter. I’m generally for a participation and learning focus for youth sport, but if one is going to provide an event that they claim is a world championship, then the races better be solid. I love the social focus and I hope that this remains a big part of the event, but it will be jarring once again to see the same level of hype around races that are half the length many of the athletes are used to competing for. I also think the event would benefit from a sprint and/or relay.

My Own Training

While the team were practising kapa haka and playing on the giant swing, I was shooting out to the forest for my own sessions and shooting back in time for managers’ meetings. I lined up 3 of my favourite sessions on challenging terrain. I did an O-Intervals at long distance race pace to stress my ability to direct attention between fighting the rough terrain and navigating. This was a very productive exercise in the sense that it beat me fair and square, and I understood why. I was unhinged a few times by unexpected recent felling that was not yet on the map. In my opinion I should have had a better hold on the contours, but it was revealed very clearly that I did not. My relocations, though, were quick and decisive. There is something about changing from one vegetation type to another that causes problems and to be reminded of that was highly beneficial.

I also did a longer session with a lot of corridor action. Navigating corridors is the next level of training for me. The features available from the map are severely limited and this reveals my limitations as a navigator immediately. I begin reaching hopefully with my eyes for something that looks right and then get pulled off my line very easily. In these corridors I was constantly getting turned, up to 90 degrees sometimes, by this hopeful grabbing at the terrain instead of holding a direction determined more by my compass and waiting more patiently for the right features to show themselves. This exercise forces me to be more precise with my compass and more sensitive to finer details.

I also did my classic direction training as I did with the team many months before. Starting with high reliance on the compass and bringing in the aid of the map later on in the exercise. Interestingly, I felt to be struggling more later in the course as a wave of complacency came over me. The right kind of pressure is key to keeping my attention. I was quite happy with my performance on this training, and I proved that it is possible to hold a straight line even in terrain with so many fallen trees. What you need is discipline. Discipline to push through dense branches, over the fallen trees, across marshy ground. And discipline to check your direction twice as much as you feel you need to.

I also had a chance to get out on the race maps after the two competitions. The long distance was another excellent outing for me too, as I practiced holding the straight lines as much as possible and spent more time in that zone where your attention is getting split between running hard and navigation. This is a dangerous place for me and I need to spend more time here to override old habits – largely thought patterns entertaining potential success or failure that are not relevant to the process of navigating. The more I notice these thought patterns the more alarmed I am when they emerge, and this could be the key out of my daydreaming trap. I need an alarm bell to go off in my mind when I regress into this very distinctive pattern of thoughts. I need something to slap me in the face otherwise I am simply lost in thought and paying no attention to navigation.

As of publishing this I’m now in Uppsala, Sweden to do more world class orienteering training, and catch up with other projects like the Perfect Flow Podcast and running coaching.