“What did you do well?”

“I knew where I was at all times.”

“I knew which direction I was leaving the control”

“I slowed down from the attack point into the control”

“I had narrow focus for my bearing and then broadened it as I got nearer the control.”

“I moved my thumb up and kept track as I crossed the different trails.”

“I picked my attack point before leaving every control.”

These are some of the things you told me during our debriefing at practice last night. I wanted to write them down because it is really good to focus on the positive. There seems to be a tendency in orienteering to focus on the negative. While we can certainly learn alot from our mistakes, we don’t want to get bogged down in them. That is why I asked you to tell me two positives first before asking you for something you would like to improve. We are still very early in our season so it is important to build confidence. We want to feel up to the challenge in our practices and competitions through the rest of the season.

It is also important this time of year to build a foundation of good basic technique. In your statements above, you mentioned attack points, traffic lights, following by thumb, orienting the map and shift of focus. You did these things successfully last night, which is great. The more times you do these skills successfully, the greater your chanecs of doing them successfully again in the future.

One way we can get in some extra practice is to consciously think about what we did as we were performing those skills. The more realistic we can make those thoughts, the better the training effect. If you can, take a few moments to replay the positive performances you mentioned above. “See” and “feel” yourself doing the skills perfectly. This is called visualization. If you practice and become good at it, visualization can be just as effective for practicing technique as actually doing the skill in the terrain.