Discussion: Botched first controls

I seem to botch the first control on a course quite regularly. Does anyone have some advice for how to prevent this from happening? I suppose that I could start at a slower speed, but slowing down doesn't seem to help very much. What is it about the first controls that makes them hard? What do you all do in order to hit the first control solidly? Am I the only one suffering from this disease?

I think more people have this problem, including myself. What I try to do is indeed take it slower, and also take the safer route towards the first control. I don't think there is much more to it.
Also if you can look on a map beforehand it might help too, making you used to the map in your hand again.

One exercise that I've done at the Vancouver Sprint-O camp specifically deals with the first control.

You get a little "flipbook" of orienteering legs. The first page has a start control, plus one or two legs on it. There are no north references, as it's meant to do without a compass.

You run the first page, which also shows the location of the next "start". When you get to the next "start", you flip the page get another "first control" and you do it again.

They make it tricky without the north lines, and they also rotate the mini maps around so that they never have the same orientation.

Get a good physical warmup in before going out on the course, too. If you are warmed up you will have more energy available for the mental task of navigation.

Also it might help to track how you mess up the first control on each course. Are you consistently overshooting, undershooting? Narrowing down the problem to one area might help.

I noticed I was having that problem for a while too. What helped me was looking at my compass before starting to see what direction north was in reference to the direction I am currently facing. Then I imagine on the map a little bit the general layout of what everything around me should look like on the map. Then when I pick up the map I orient it quickly. This process has seemed to help me out a little bit. But for some reason this year control #2 is now plagueing me! =)

Echoing the physical/muscle warmup mentioned above, I also find it helpful to get 'warmed back up' to orienteering - look at a map with a course drawn on it and do armchair orienteering on it before you start. Or even better combine both into a model course if there is one.

I've found that at the speed I run at, a warmup isn't really necessary and it tends to make me go too fast at the start. But if I haven't been orienteering in a while then I will try to look at a map of a recent race that morning.

I find that when I do make mistakes it is because I don't have a feel for the map scale versus how fast I will be moving (or I don't check the meet notes about the scale ahead of time). I try to review the scale and terrain ahead of time, and get comfortable with how long it will take me to run 1cm on the map.

Rarely a problem (well no more so than most other controls) for me at my slowish pace, but I have had a couple of times where I've inverted the contours and couldn't understand what was happening for a few moments.

More often I muck up the second last control when I'm fatigued but for some stupid reason overconfident and already thinking the job is done.

I think this problem is more about preparation than about execution. Physical warm-up and mental preparation, especially some visualization immediately before your race should help. So too, probably, is not talking to any of your friends (or enemies) for 10 or 15 minutes before you start.

It is a well known fact (? or is that 'old wives tale') that orienteers make more mistakes on the first and second-to-last controls. Great course planners are, of course, well aware of this phenomena and depending on which course you run on will set more or less challenging legs.

Agree with some others here. It's a combo of mental and physical factors. It takes a few minutes after starting exercising for your body to adjust so that working muscles are properly supplied with oxygen (and once this is balanced out, the brain gets its share sorted too), hence the importance of a physical warm-up / not starting too hard and going straight into oxygen debt.

Mentally, you need to find a routine that gets you focused on what you are about to do - stop talking to people a set time before you start. Look around and get a feel for the terrain and what it might look like on a map, (I don't do this often, but one of the best ways I've found is to warm-up with a map and course, even if it is of a different area, just to get my brain into map reading mode before I start) check which way is north, if you have a routine for the other legs on a course - eg checking control feature, attackpoint, big things to look for on the way, catching features - make sure it's the first thing you do when you pick up your map.

And once you've nailed the first one, keep concentrating (I used to have a recurring problem with no. 3, where my mind would wander after concentrating hard on the first 2 legs)

Most effective way for me to deal with this problem was to use visualisation at home. Lay down, do any kind of sophrology exercise in order to be fully relaxed, and then visualise yourself warming up, entering the start, and running perfectly the first control. You can use the image of an old race you did, and modify the intern "video" in order to see yourself doing everything perfectly.
Getting to the same point than fletch: It is very important, before doing so, to define what we call here in Switzerland a "Laufkonzept" (running concept). This is strictly personal and cannot be given to you by a fellow runner. T. Bührer, trainer of the Swiss team, insists a lot on this mental principle. It consists of defining an ideal movie of what you do between two controls. What are the steps you need to do in order to get to the control in an ideal way? For that you need to analyze a lot of past races and observe yourself acting. Ultimately you will be able to identify those steps by words, each word being a link to an action (mine was for example: compass - control -route - check points - attackpoint - "auso!") Each word meant a whole action and I had integrated this running concept so deaply that it was automatic, and could be called back at any moment. If I identified I was near from loosing concentration, the simple fact of shouting in my head "compass!" would put me in the "machine" again, because each action is so deeply linked to the next one in your mind.
So, what is the reason behind talking so long about the need of a running concept? Simply because if you have one, and are also able to visualize yourself using it perfectly to the first control, you will do it mecanically on the day of the race and manage it without problem.
I would even go a bit further: if your running concept is inserted deeply enough in your mind, you won't have the risk anymore to start too fast, because you are forced to do the steps of your concept in the right order.
The exercise given by Kupackman is also excellent.

Running concepts are extremely powerful... They do ask a lot of introspection and hard work before it works "from itself", but it is definitively worth it.

Spike did an interesting series of posts about first controls a few years ago:
http://okansas.blogspot.com/2005/09/looking-at-som...
http://okansas.blogspot.com/2005/09/first-control-...
http://okansas.blogspot.com/2005/09/more-on-first-...

and here is the first-control training Patrick mentioned:
http://okansas.blogspot.com/2009/02/training-first...

Wow, 2005! Thanks for finding those, Ken. I knew that Spike wrote about first control stuff, but after a quick search, all I could find was the write-up from the Vancouver Sprint Camp.