Adventure Racing #10: Tips For Navigation

[@adventurewithbow]

Great points! Thank you for sharing. Definitely having a second, experienced opinion helps when you're under fatigue, it's dark, cold, raining, or can't get a visual on surrounding terrain features. Another tactic we use is setting "backstops" for errors. Like, "if we come to a lake on the left then we've overshot the turnoff by 300m" or something like that. The sooner you can realize an error or missed turn and catch yourself is valuable time saved. I would love to hear your thoughts on strategy with cross-country route choice and also navigating/distance estimation while paddling open water in the dark.

[@ARonAR]

Yep, so much to discuss, lol. We call the backstops "catching features" over here in the UK. I've mentioned them but will be worth going more into details about such, and handrails, attackpoints, aiming off etc. :)

[@adventurewithbow]

@@ARonAR Wonderful, thank you. Yes, I watched this video first then found you mentioned this topic more extensively elsewhere! Keep up the great work. There's nothing else like this content out there.

[@captainnicolasdubois]

The navigator is the slowest person of my team. I find it works very well, the navigator who is at the back gives instructions "look for this, go there, more to the right etc". It's no longer someone slower following the team but one of the most important team member everybody try to help and support.

[@guidojoe11]

If I had to rank my AR skill set, navigation would be at the bottom of the list. This helps tremendously! Thank you for another great video.

[@scany1980]

Thank you! Another great video.

[@Skye-289]

Hi Adam, great video. A suggestion for a new video (and something you touched on here) is how to be an effective team captain.

[@ARonAR]

Hehehe. I like the idea, but am not sure I'm the best person to talk about that. I have made many mistakes over the years......... 🤣

[@hartstrengthendurance9643]

Thanks a ton for these!! Very, very helpful.

[@ARonAR]

Those tips were hard earned ;)

[@girbenedetti]

Love it

[@JTHuddo]

Thanks for more great tips

[@tcankar]

Nice buff :) i didn't know that you raced in Slovenia, i was at that race as well :) nice videos, thank you!

[@ARonAR]

Heheh, it was a cool course, Tomaž. First time I did a stage of snorkel orienteering - a great idea. I was looking at ARS this week but I see they stopped in 2018 after more than 10 years. A pity. Was a great, fast race.

[@tcankar]

Real pity, yes. We have a few local races but the main "local" one is adventure race croatia, which is beautiful. I was going through your videos as a reminder for the Croatian race, to help things run smoothly :) hope to race in africa one day too :)

[@XEinstein]

I am a strong believer that everyone in the team should navigate sections. If you do not than I believe you will miss a very essential part of what AR is. AR is not a sport where you just run behind everyone else until magically at some point the finishing line appears. As much as anything I consider AR to be a thinking sport, much like chess, rather than a physical sport and if as a team member you opt to just let the captain and nav make all the tactical decisions than you really miss the essence of racing. So I my team everyone navigates. And we tend to change at each stage. Surely we do have a main nav, who is the most experienced person on the team, but still everyone navigates.

[@ARonAR]

Spot on! That's some experience talking :)