Discussion: Spiked Controls

What counts as 'spiking' a control ?
My current interpretation is that spiking is an error free -optimum route leg which could not really have been improved.
Can anyone verify?

I guess different people have different standards, and as you get better, your standards might change. (When I first moved to Sweden, I would count losing less than 30 seconds on a control to be a spike, but now that's down to 10 seconds or so.) But in general, your definition sounds good.

To me spiking means running confidently to where you expect the control to be, and lo, it appears as expected. A nervous and slow accurate approach doesn't sound like a spike. But maybe this attitude comes from relatively easy spur-gully as a home base.

I'd say a control was spiked if you executed your plan for the leg without errors (or excessive caution). If your route was optimal, that's nice but not essential to spiking the control, otherwise it would be impossible to spike a control if you deliberately took a safer route choice rather than a faster but navigationally more dangerous optimal route.

Yes I suppose. You otherwise end up getting into discussion about what is 'optimal' and for whom.

Well, I still don't consider it a 'spike' if I review the course and find that there was a better route choice that I failed to notice during the race.

Interesting ...but what if your plan is to run like snot to the general vicinity of the control, then relocate and go find the control? I'd say that if you have to relocate, then it isn't a spike, but it is still a good tactic on certain legs.

As far as I understand it, elite orienteerers can run like snot to the exact control location without having to relocate. I think you can have an attackpoint and still consider it 'spiking', but to me 'relocating' implies that you have been lost at some point.

From reading these comments, it's pretty clear that the definition of spiking a control varies depending on one's level of orienteering skills! Which is as it should be.

As the intermediate orienteer that I am, I would view spiking a control as always knowing where I am on the leg, going right to the control, and having it be where I think it is, on the first try. Maybe my route wasn't perfectly optimum (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight), or maybe I intentionally chose a non-optimum but safer route. Or maybe I had to stop a few times during the leg to ponder the map to make sure I was on course. I would still call that a spike, for myself.

But I can see that for a more advanced orienteer, he or she would be much stricter about what constitutes a spike.

I agree with RLShadow as to his definition of a spike, and that's how I use it on my own log.

Your log is for your information, usually, and for other's entertainment.

.....and here was me thinking it was getting the dibber in first shot without the usual bit of foreplay where I jab it in the general direction a few times before finally getting a "beep".....

Well, maybe an otherwise perfectly executed leg doesn't count as a spike if you fumble the punch!

(Most people would almost always count the finish as a spike, but that's the one that almost always takes me two seconds to punch)

I don't even count the finish as a control.

That's because you don't get there half the time. :p

I always punch the finish! It's some of the ones beforehand I sometimes have trouble with.