Thomas Laraia
Hello everyone! I recently had the chance to go to the Maximus Orienteering Meeting (MOM) to the west of Madrid, to take a shot at orienteering in what I believe will probably be the most fun maps I might experience this year. The competition, comprised of a long distance, middle distance, sprint, and classic distance race in four consecutive days, was graced with four entirely new maps that were (almost all) debuted at this competition. I was fortunate to come to Spain with the Scottish Elite Development Squad (SEDS) handling the scheduling and accommodation details, so I could just focus on the nav for the week.
With the pleasantries out of the way and the stage set, let’s get straight into the nitty gritty! I have been putting a lot of effort into dissecting the things that I am consistently doing wrong and trying to destroy them like a meat tenderizer to a schnitzel. A high-quality event like this is an absolute data mine for that, so I had my hardhat and pickaxe ready. I won’t bore you with the details here, you can find that on my Attackpoint log if you’re ever so keen, but we came here ready to work.
We had two days before the races to get out into the terrain and prime our brains for what was to come, and we tried to make use of that time as best we could. I came into the week with a training volume target to stop me from getting carried away with doing every training, a common pitfall at longer training camps, and this played out wonderfully. On some of the race days, we planned to do afternoon training, which I did at an easy pace and tried to use to correct what was going wrong in the races. It’s also not every week you get to use the usual mental energy normally used for work and you’re slap bang in the middle of such a beautiful set of orienteering maps, so you better believe that this opportunity will not be wasted away.
I typically spent about two hours in the evenings on analysis, writing everything on my log with as much detail as I can for the same reason that I hand-write all my university notes. The goal is to make recalling useful things easier by having a visual representation. For example, the images showing my worst mistakes from MOM and my explanation of what I think went wrong is going to be pretty much etched into my brain for the foreseeable future because of the effort I put into making those graphics, including figuring out what I actually wanted to show and how to avoid an unreadable clutter of lines that might as well have been scribbled with crayon by a child on your living room wall. Do I think too much for my own good? Perhaps. I’ll let the next few years decide that.
An example of an annotated leg (purple is where he thought he was, red is actual line, green are noted features
Now, what about the fun bits? It’s not all locking yourself in the cellar with a typewriter and not coming out until you’ve solved a Millennium Problem. There are the fun bits and the memories as well. I bought my first ever magnifier at MOM and used it a few times during the long when the contour details were a bit too much to handle. That was at the recommendation of Luke Fisher, who started orienteering a few years ago and is quickly becoming a brilliant orienteer. During the trainings, if he messed up a leg, he would run back to the previous control and do it again. I’m not sure if I personally know anyone else as dedicated to the fundamentals of improvement through training as he is, but it is certainly inspiring.
At the beginning of the camp, we were playing a game of Catan every night, although that died out when David Bunn’s losing streak became a bit too hard for him to handle. Some of the other boys found a Sorry! board, but had never heard of the game and made up their own set of rules. It was a bewildering experience to step into the room halfway into the game.
The house we were staying at had a pen of goats that were let out every day to wander around and eat leaves. The young one, Pedro, was around two weeks old, and David quickly tried to enforce a paternal role in young Pedro’s life. We also had access to a crystal clear, but horribly cold river, complete with a step ladder for easy exit and soft sediment river floor. I only went in on one occasion, which was enough for me. I don’t really know what takeaway message this post may have. Orienteering is brilliant, and I simply can’t wait to do more. See you at the Flying Pig.
US National Orienteering Team 