Tracking my wanderlust need to get out of town once a month

Track my O progress here

Goal for 2003

My goal for 2003 is to increase my orienteering consistency.

How am I going to do that? A) practice O technique and B) increase fitness. How will “consistency” be measured? By how often I hit a control the first time (less stringent than a spike; I’ll allow up to 2 minute mistakes). I would like to average an 85% hit rate on course controls (as opposed to training exercises).

Last November, I started thinking about my goal for 2003. To begin, I looked at the past year’s results, and was disappointed in the up and down nature. I had a fantastic day at the short champs, and a disaster in Idaho. How could the same person have both sets of results?

So, being a geeky quality control person, I decide to analyze my mistakes via a Pareto chart. Of course, all O mistakes can be traced back to lack of concentration, but I tried to break them down further, into techniques I could practice and improve. The two main causes of my mistakes were: 1. failing to follow a straight line and 2. not reading contour detail. The next two were route choice and distance judgment. Together, those four led to 55% of my missed controls. I discovered that I only hit 75% of my A meet controls in 2002, which is pretty sad. So, I’ll try to improve to 85% in 2003. I will practice more O technique this year, especially the 4 techniques listed. I will also do more armchair O. Hopefully, this will help me read the map better during competitions, and increase my consistency.

I know that fitness also plays a big role in my O consistency. If I increase my fitness, I will be less likely to make mistakes due to fatigue. I have two general goals to help me get fit. First, follow a training regime designed to enable me to run a slow 10K race by December. I have no desire to actually run a 10K, and I may or may not run one in December. However, the training program will gradually increase the time and distance that I run, thereby increasing my endurance. Second, I will average 850 minutes of training per month for the year. Currently, I have a goal of 1000 minutes per month, but so far I have never actually done 1000. I will try to train more, and regularly, in 2003.


posted by Mary 6:33 PM [edit]