Advanced Skills: Pace Counting

At the end of a recent expedition race I participated in, there was a very challenging rogaine course (an orienteering course where you could get points in any order). This course threw teams for a serious loop - there was variable terrain, giant lava fields, tough vegetation, and a lot of smaller land features that did not show up on the 1:24000 maps we were provided. This all combines to make a course that is easy to get turned around on. For example, if you're going uphill looking for a checkpoint right at the top, any downhills that aren't bigger than the contour interval (in this case, 40ft) and more than 50m wide, just will not show up on the map at all. This means that you have to have a good sense of how far you've come, and what elevation you're at. Having an altimeter helps with elevation, and a stopwatch can help with the distance one, but the gold standard is pace counting.

Some instructors teach pace counting by having folks go out and count their paces (times one foot steps on the ground) on a known course/distance. Then you get to some number, say "60 paces for 100m". This is a good starting point for many, but it can be quite inaccurate, as depending on conditions and speed, the number can range wildly. Specifically, my personal counts vary from 30 (jogging downhill) to 110 or even more (picking my way uphill through dense vegetation). This means that I could be off by almost 50% in either direction, which makes an awful lot of work pretty much useless.

To help myself improve my pace counting abilities, I added a feature to the Orienteer app (for iOS and Android) that is accessible in "learn" mode for Pro users. By enabling "pace counting beep", you get a beep every 100m you walk. Count paces in your head, and make note of how high you have to count before it beeps. You'll start to develop an intuition for vegetation, conditions, and pacing. Start predicting what number it'll beep at, and see if you're low, high or right on. It took me 6 months of practicing every few weeks, but I got to the point where in this last race, I was basically never off from whatever my map-based estimate of the distance was. I'm guessing this was about 5-10% or so, but I haven't gone back in to figure out what the exact distances were.

This was transformational for our navigation in this race. It meant that even if we hadn't found a checkpoint, we still would have known pretty closely where we were so we could have reattacked from a different angle without issue.