Friday, June 22, 2012

Predicting Race Courses

WOC is 22 days away. I've been spending some time training with the WOC competition maps, just like in years' past and like I did leading up to the team trials this year. Lots of visualization training. A bit of draft course planning.

I'm a bit wary of this type of training because I think you can get caught into the trap of just gazing at the maps, and I find it's key to make the practice into deliberate practice. The "10,000 hours of (deliberate) practice" anecdote often gets shortened to leave out the key part!

In 2009, I remember making a very good prediction of the first long leg in the Long Quali. I also made a massive mistake as I was way too over-confident! Lesson learned.

On the positive side, I think it can be very powerful to predict the type course you'll encounter, but I've learned my lesson about becoming too complacent when you encounter a 'familiar' leg during the race!

For interest's sake, here are a couple draft courses I made for our Team Trials this year!


...and my course.







...and my course.



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