expedition playbook: navigation

Adventure racing legend, friend, and teammate Mark Lattanzi wrote an excellent book on the topic of navigation. Go read it.
 
Rather than do a deep dive on technicalities of navigation, here are some general reflections on big questions and strategies to consider as a navigator and as a team.
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Expeditions vs. shorter events

​Navigation tends to be “easier” in multi-day races, in that there are fewer CPs and most of them tend to be relatively easy to find. Shorter adventure races typically include a fair bit of micro-nav or even challenging orienteering. You might be looking for a checkpoint every fifteen minutes in a short race. In an expedition race, you might travel for fifteen hours between checkpoints. The challenge often is more in the route finding than the precision, as there are often different options to traverse these long distances.

​For the Endless Mountains, expect a hybrid approach to race design. Some legs will be relatively straight forward navigationally, with few checkpoints.  You will also encounter some navigation that’s more challenging than you would typically find in many expedition races.

Disciplines

​The hardest navigation tends to be on foot. Bike and paddle sections are often relatively straightforward in an expedition race. As is true in a shorter race, trekking tends to offer more advanced, off-trail navigation opportunities.

This will absolutely be true at the Endless Mountains. You’ll encounter trails on trekking stages, but we like to get people out into the woods, navigating overland.

Lead nav vs. by committee

​This is an impossible to answer question: should one person try to navigate the entire race, or should the team divide up the load? This really comes down to your team strengths and goals. Consider this flow chart in creating your navigational strategy:

Some general considerations, regardless of which strategy you take:

• Some lead navigators find that they stay more mentally engaged – and consequently more awake – than their teammates later in the race. But when the navigational focus ends and the team finds themselves on a long, relatively mindless ride or paddle on Day 4, they tend to crash mentally (and sometimes literally). Our theory is that navigation requires substantial mental energy output over the course of the race. This means that when the navigator is focused on the maps, they’re more engaged and awake, but when they don’t have that stimulation, they may a price for it. Whereas other team members may experience a steady ebb and flow of energy over the course of the event, a navigator’s ability to stay sharp and stay awake is contingent on, well, having navigation to do.  
• For this reason, the rest of the team needs to look out for the navigator. Know their signs of fatigue and try to catch them before the team finds itself two ridgelines over from the checkpoint because sleepmonsters distracted the navigator from the details on the map.
• Likewise, for navigators: don’t let ego get in the way. If you are navving and the team stops you to point out that you seem to be having harder time making decisions and staying on course, or perhaps to tell you that you are making uncharacteristic mistakes, you need to be able to step back and admit this to yourself. Either get some sleep or pass the maps off to someone else on the team.
• If you have two sets of maps, USE THEM. If the lead navigator becomes impaired, or if you set out with the plan to rotate nav duties, it can make a big difference if the back-up nav or tagging-in navigator has been paying attention to maps. There is often a learning curve that comes with navigating in a new location on new maps. Trying to take over the maps on night three can be even worse than letting a tired primary navigator continue to bobble.​

• Label and organize your maps. This comes down to your prep time. As you would in a shorter race, clearly mark your route, add cutoff times, scrawl your clues down if they aren’t already on the map, note out-of-bounds roads and trails, and highlight dark zones. Waterproof or map-bag each map, and label them chronologically if not already labeled by the RDs. 

• Make sure you know which maps you need when (as noted in the last Expedition Playbook post, don’t make the classic mistake of storing maps in a bike box only to find you needed them in your paddle bag… we share this from experience…). Remember, the race will start off like any other, but in a few days, things can go sideways fast when it comes to navigation. If your maps are a mess going into the race, it’s going to turn a challenging stage into an absolute mind bender on Day 4.
• Make sure you pay close attention to the instructions and rules. There will be a lot of information to process. Don’t rush it and miss the out-of-bounds trail or road and then get penalized or disqualified for making a mistake during the race. Many navigators (including Rootstockers) make the mistake of succumbing to the pressures that come with pre-race route and map planning. If you need to take some extra time to prep, label, and organize your maps, do it. Ten extra minutes of map prep is worth it if it saves ten hours of mistakes.

• It should go without saying, but make sure you have a good waterproof map case or bagging system, and invest in a good quality bike board. We are huge fans (and, disclaimer, vendors) of Autopilot Map Boards. While there are other great bike boards on the market and plenty of interesting and effective DIY efforts out there, we love how easy it is to install and detach the

Autopilots. Especially when building or breaking down bikes, we’re grateful for their simple attachment systems and don’t miss the maddening nuts and bolts many other boards require. It may be fine to mount those boards in your garage for a weekend ride, but no one needs a Mensa puzzle on day five. You just want to build your bike, throw on a map board, and go.

​Beyond this, navigation comes down to experience. The more, the better. Incorporate navigation into your training: go to some orienteering meets, compete in some weekend adventure races, print out a topo map from Caltopo, mark it up, and go practice (if you have a GPS device, you can check out your route either while in the woods or afterwards and see how you did).

​Even better, practice navigating with your team and work on navigating as a unit rather than leaving it all up to one person. Have everyone work on pace-counting and following bearings, so that everyone can be a better, more effective backup navigator. The more navigation becomes a team effort, the more engaged everyone can be, especially when folks start getting tired. This doesn’t mean navigating by consensus – you want to be careful not to create a “too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen” situation – but some of the best navigators in the sport lean on others to maximize the team’s performance.