In the past few years, I’ve really gotten into orienteering. I love the challenge of trying to think critically about navigation and route choice with an oxygen-deprived brain, while at he same time running full-steam dodging Devil’s Club and deadfall. Hmmm, when I describe it that way, it sounds more like torture. But I assure you, it is a blast. Except for those times when I make a mistake, then it is incredibly frustrating. But most of the time it is fun. Really.
Another reason I enjoy orienteering is that I am still improving, unlike skiing and most other sports where I am already several years past my prime. My navigational mistakes seem to be getting fewer, which makes up for my lack of fitness. But on the other hand, each mistake I do make is now even more costly and aggravating. For instance, in the first meet of the season, I ran really well, and was almost keeping pace with Ian (easily the fastest guy at our meets). But near the end I made one mistake that cost me about 15 minutes. Ouch.
Another great aspect of orienteering is analyzing route choices after the fact. To that end, a few of us use RouteGadget to compare our races virtually. We keep track of our split times during the races, then draw our route into RouteGadget after the meet. Since we never see each other during the meet, this is the only way we can ‘race’ head to head. It’s a little bit geeky, but it’s also pretty cool.
Here’s how you can watch our race from this week:
- Click this link for Wednesday’s meet
- Select the “Red” course from the “Select class/course” dropdown menu
- Select all the names, using Ctrl-Click
- Check the “Names on/off” checkbox
- Click “View Animation”
- Click “Start”
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