COACHING

Why do we make mistakes?

Grant Bluett – OA Head Coach

Iwas 60 minutes into my course on Day 2 of the Australian 3-Days at Easter, more than three quarters of the way around. The first 60min had been relatively easy orienteering, mainly spur-gully, with the odd bit of gold mining. For the entire race I knew that the coming controls into the finish would be the most demanding of the course, in particular 20, 21, and 22. This is where the race would be won or lost.

A couple of hundred meters before I entered this tricky gold mining section I passed Rob Fell (a promising junior who I had met on the junior squad training camp in January), I mentioned to him what was going on in my head at the time, “this is the business section of the course”. I ran on. I knew what I had to do. I had to concentrate 100% on my orienteering, and let the speed at which I could read the map dictate the speed I ran.

I entered the gold mining area making sure I knew exactly where I was when I ran into the detail. I jumped down an earth embankment straight into a small patch of blackberries. I ripped myself free and ran on towards my control. I followed the creek bed and tried to read the knolls on my left. I wasn’t picking them up very well. I fumbled my way to the control, losing about 10 seconds by not picking up the knolls the control was between early enough, and having to come into the control from the right through another blackberry patch.

I was fuming, I knew this was the most important section of the course and I still managed to stuff it up. I charged off to the second of these three particularly hard controls. I thought to myself, I’m not going to try and read those bloody knolls any more, I’m going to generalise and read my way to the control from the big earth embankment that surrounds all the detail. I ran around the embankment and up into the area where I thought the control should be. But it wasn’t…?? I thought this must just be some erosion gully that isn’t marked on the map and started to search for the right one. After about 40 seconds of searching I stopped and relocated, “bugger - I am about 100m from the control”, I ran on and got the control. THANK YOU, I’m glad that’s over I thought, and ran out of the area of gold mining as fast as I could.

Remember how I said there were three controls in that detailed area of gold mining? And I have only described how I found two of them and then ran on! That’s right, I didn’t get that 3rd one! I was so anxious to get out of that area that I was orienteering so horribly in that I didn’t even visit the 22nd control.

So a DNF for me on the 2nd day of Easter, but more importantly there are a few lessons to be learnt here.

As I entered the “area” I knew what I had to do. I had spotted the danger. I had a plan. I had experienced simular situations hundreds of times. I consider myself a pretty good orienteer so I should have been able to get through there - no problem at all. Instead, when I made my first small mistake on the way to the 20th control I did everything wrong. I made the mistake because I didn’t have a good enough mental picture of what the terrain would look like or, in other words, I hadn’t read the map well enough.

What I should have done on my way to control no 21 is calmed down and taken some more time to read the map on the next leg. I should have got a clear picture of what the knolls look like, and combined that with the earth embankments, so that I had a more complete picture, and more points of reference. I did the opposite - I rushed off and read the map less.

Not visiting the 22nd control is the most basic of all mistakes. Somehow, after all that stress of the past two controls, I managed to forget that 22 not 23 comes after 21!

The most frustrating thing about Orienteering is that we can know exactly what we SHOULD do, and yet in the pressure of the race situation do the exact opposite. So what is to blame here? I obviously made a few bad judgments. It is very easy to blame it on the stress of the race. But when I break it all down I didn’t read the map well enough! This is the one constant when we make orienteering mistakes. Sure we can all find something else to blame, but the base of these problems always comes from a mistake in our map reading technique.

Next time you make a mistake, forget the excuses. Think back to where you went wrong, and work out where you lost map contact, or why you misinterpreted the map. When you have worked this out, you have really learnt something. Take ownership of your mistakes, blame them on your map reading, and work on how to go about that situation better next time. By concentrating on your orienteering technique, you will by default also be working on how to mentally approach a similar situation next time.