Note
So when is the last time anyone had an orienteering lesson?
I ask this only because there is a widely held belief among practitioners of both sports that orienteering and golf are essentially the same thing. And today, for the first time in a few years, I had a golf lesson.
So the pro asked me what I was having trouble with. And I said, check my fundamentals (grip, stance, alignment, posture, etc.), something is screwed up and so nothing feels right.
So he had me hit a few balls, and in all honesty they weren't bad, better than my average effort recently, and then he showed me what I was really doing, and mainly my alignment was way off. And we spent ten minutes working on that (get aimed correctly, then straight back, straight forward is the mantra), and I was a new man. Off to play a few holes, it was a remarkable difference.
Of course alignment plays a major role in O'.
I remember a long, long time ago, when I was not so old and Peggy was just a young babe, and I was giving her an O ' lesson of sorts, and I thought it would be useful to check her alignment.
So the instructions to her were simple -- run due west. And just so I could tell how often she was looking at her compass, since I was running behind her, I told her to yell, "Beep," every time she looked at her compass.
And we started off. And I had quite deviously chosen as a starting point a spot where there was a fallen tree just to her west, so the first 10 or 20 yards had to be to the northwest. And then I figured she would correct back to due west.
But it never happened. She kept going merrily northwest, beeping quite frequently, until after about 150 yards I invoked the mercy rule and stopped her. I was also laughing too hard to keep going.
She obviously had an alignment problem. The compass was getting lined up to due west by bending the wrist a lot, not by turning the body. And the result was a fundamental skill in O' that she hadn't mastered. And this was a way to point that out, and therefore the first step to fixing it.
Do we ask ourselves how good our O' fundamentals are? And regularly get them checked?