Discussion: number of controls

In 2008, where I could go on a lot of orienteering training camps and feel that my technical skills improved a lot, I went to 1030 controls. 2006 = 1094, but I did one course with 150 controls. This year so far = 388 (!) I knew I didn't have much time for orienteering this year, but I didn't realize that I went to so few controls...

Why not increase the number of hours as well?

Well, if you look at the discussions about training and coaching on the US Team mailing list, you get a lot of people saying that they cannot fit any more hours into their schedules because of work, family, other priorities, etc. So given that, perhaps the focus should be on maximizing the number of controls visited?

I think the most obvious answer is to turn some of the track/interval sessions into orienteering interval sessions. You can do that without having a 'standard' orienteering map, it just takes a bit of work, but I wonder if the 'controls' found in those would be as useful.

If you did an interval workout that involved running several loops of controls around a city park on an aerial photo, would that be valuable O training? Just having a map in your hand and focusing on direction while running hard sounds useful, and it wouldn't hurt, but I'd want to make sure I was still running hard enough and actually getting some kind of benefit from the map portion...

1063 so far this year, with a lot more to go! (hopefully)

I realized that my number of controls counted are for actual controls, I do more orienteering training than that where I am running a course without controls.

Sandra, you could have stuck with your number of competition controls, stuck your tongue out at me, and said, "See, I'm better with less controls!" ;-)

Forget controls, how did you do on the högskoleprovet? And is it bad form to use both "the" and the "-et" suffix?

perhaps JJ just needs to set more courses ;)

I was just doing my yearly season analysis and updated my control count for the year. Now I have all the control, regardless if a training or a race. Count = 1113. That seems more reasonable.

I think it's an interesting concept to compare controls visited. I am going to try to visit more controls next year than ever before :-)

ndobbs >> You have to make a choice of which language you´re actually using... I´d say "Högskoleprovet" without "the" but I would probably refer to it in Swedish so that makes more sense ;)

To get even more "O-likeness" into your training you can also combine your interval sessions and/or your tempo sessions with e-punching - thus simulating the start/stop motion of a sprint.