Is this a decision?

Part 1 of a series on decision-making under pressure

I am a software engineer and an adventure racer. Superficially, these two pursuits are quite different — an average day of software engineering is split between typing and meetings, and an average adventure race is spent running, cycling, and navigating. While different in the details, a lot of similarities are obvious when I zoom out; I’ve learned a lot of lessons in adventure racing that wind up applying in the rest of my life. Adventure racing is really a sport of competitive decision-making, and the straightforward success metric (i.e. who crosses the line first) makes it easy to take apart decisions after the fact and have much clearer conversations about what went well and what didn’t go well. In a really great competition, you can compare other teams’ decisions against your own, which gives even more clarity. In my software engineering life, it’s rare or never that I can have detailed counterfactuals (what would have happened if other decisions had been made). As much as we try to grade our decisions, it’s never straightforward at my “real” job.

What is a decision?

I’ll be honest, almost everything is a decision. They range from tiny decisions (how hard do I push right now?) to big decisions (do we take the high road or the low road?). You can spot decisions and choose, or you can miss a decision point and go with whatever default there was. They take on every different shape and size, but at the end of the day — the sum of all the decisions you and your team make (including during training) is your finishing time. At the risk of stating the obvious, the goal is to see impactful decisions ahead of time, and choose efficiently and wisely in the moment.

This is hard, very hard.

Story time

In the most recent AR World Championships (2023, Kouga South Africa), there was a “dark zone” right in the middle of the race. Teams that wound up paddling a river section at night would be required to pull over, and stop for 10h until daylight returned. In all of the pre-race commentary, this was framed as a make-it-or-break-it “divider” between the field. The thought was that teams that made it through that section in daylight would have an insurmountable lead on teams that did not. It turns out that of the 6 teams that “cleared” the dark zone, several did not finish, and many were so beaten-up by the ordeal that their paces never recovered. Team Vidaraid, the farthest along the course when the dark zone closed (requiring them to sleep for 10h), wound up chasing down all but one team — winding up in 2nd position after it was all said and done.

My team, Bend Racing / SkinDoctor, was the last team to make it through the dark zone. We wound up spending so much energy trying to make the dark zone, and so much unexpected energy fighting hypothermia after we made it, that we never really recovered our pace. There were a few things we could have done differently. There are two decisions I regret not seeing, and one I do not regret making.

The first one I regret not seeing is: We could easily have been warmer on the paddle. While sitting in a boat, your body lets your legs get quite cold, as they’re not moving. As soon as you stand up and start moving, this cold blood circulates again and you get a hypothermic shock. We know how cold nighttime paddles are, even in hot climates — we should have paused and put on additional layers to preserve the heat in our legs. The acute hypothermia we experienced in Worlds this year rendered us completely useless for nearly half an hour of uncontrollable shivering while our bodies tried to equilibrate. Pretty weird to get hypothermia in Africa, but it was quite a common story in this race.

The second decision I regret not seeing is: we could easily have rested more once we had warmed up. We defaulted to the usual “2 hours of sleep” duration (this may seem crazy — it’s actually longer than many professional teams sleep each night in an adventure race). We didn’t see this as a decision — we just were on auto-pilot and kept racing. If we had spent 4 hours sleeping instead of 2, we’d have been much fresher for the bike ride, and we wouldn’t have even been riding during the last few hours of the rainstorm. We’d have ridden our bikes exclusively in nice, fast conditions, with fresh legs and fresh(ish) spirits.

The decision we did see and that I do not regret is using the dark zone as a motivator. In the 20 or so hours leading up to the dark zone, we had a pretty clear focus — stay motivated, stay focused, and keep moving. The clear vision here helped us work well together, and do something we set out to do at the outset. It really is in the details above that we left a lot of time on the table—but the general pattern of using race timing to motivate efficient racing is a good one.

So how do you actually get better at spotting decision points?

We had a lot of post-race debriefs where we sweated the details, and knew exactly what the decisions we should have made were. Unfortunately, this is not enough, not by a lot. It’s really easy, from the comfort of the post-race hotel room, to say some variation of “we were dumb, let’s be smarter next time”. Good luck with that, but it’s a strategy that got us very little progress for almost 10 years.

A few things stand out in having helped our team break the stalemate of post-race clarity following in-race fog.

1. Remind yourself of what you knew at the time. Sure, it’s obvious now what is right, but what did you see, know, etc. in the moment that you dismissed or didn’t think about enough? In this most recent race, a lot of the “missed decisions” came from not correctly weighing the difficulty of the race. The estimates for stage length provided by the race organization turned out to be far faster than even the fastest teams could do. This was obvious during a race, but it never occurred to us to shift strategies. That was a key thing that should have caused an in-race reassessment — if a race is “running slow” we should make sure we re-calibrate our expectations and race strategy, not just continue with the same pacing and strategy we started the race with.
2. Get in the habit of thinking of things as decisions. Asking the question “what are the decisions in front of us, and what’s coming up” can shed a lot of light on where the levers are. We do this constantly during races — interestingly, many of our missed decisions in this race actually came from having made the opposite mistake in other (shorter, faster) races. Earlier this season, we played with altering sleep durations and paddling layering changes with little success — in hindsight because those races weren’t hard enough to see the benefits from those kinds of tweaks. We went into this race with overconfidence in sleep timing because we had recently “tested something” and it hadn’t paid off.
3. Instantly forgive yourself. Holding on to regret and disappointment prevents learning. There are only two options: you can succeed, or you can learn something. Shift to learning & curiosity as soon as you can, and reward yourself for doing so quickly. Decisions are always clearer in hindsight, and you want to stay curious — don’t fog things up with retained or repressed negative feelings. Name your feelings, thank them for the motivation and information, and let them go.
4. Be mindful of costs, and their effect on your perception. AR lessons, especially captaining & strategy lessons, const an insane amount of time and money. For a team of four people to train for months, travel across the world, and do an insanely long race to extract a lesson or two is crazy. The best kind of crazy, but still. This can cause two things: overvaluing the lesson, and also trying to pull too many lessons out of any given race. I can’t tell you the number of time’s we’ve absolutely screwed ourselves by “doing what we should have done that other time”. Also, there’s the temptation to take every little thing that happened during a race and try to make sure it’s better next time. Don’t think that because something was right, or wrong, at some other point in time, that it’s right or wrong now. Keep lessons embedded in the story they’re from, don’t hastily generalize just because you paid so much for the lesson.

Of course, there are no silver bullets. Experience helps, but it can also be overwhelming. There are so many decisions we’ve gone back and forth on over the years! Sometimes a quick sleep is all you need, most of the time two hours is enough, and sometimes you need more. If you’re having a hard time finding a checkpoint, it’s usually a good idea to try getting to it from another direction, but sometimes it really is just around the next bend (this cost us 5th place, by the way). This can be motivating or frustrating — for me, it’s both. I love working hard in such a delicate balance and trying to untangle the puzzle. It’s the details and chaos that have me still interested over a decade into it. Embracing the complexity and tuning in to my curiosity has been a challenge, but a worthy one.

These tools grew out of my team’s adventure racing practice, but they’ve served me in my professional life as well. I have to work much harder to keep counterfactuals honest, because usually I don’t have much visibility into competitor’s decisions, let alone a hundred or so competitors to compare on a specific course. However, in many way’s decisions are easier professionally. The pace of things is much slower and better-slept. You just have more time to spot decision points, and you can stretch them out in time, keep detailed notes, and ask for feedback on decision-points and decisions themselves. Although we actually printed out, brought, and used a hard-copy of a crucial decision-making framework at Worlds this year, it’s much easier to take a break during a meeting to read over notes than to do so when you have a dozen teams behind you trying to snag your spot on the podium!

Want to practice decision-making outdoors? Try out the app I made: orienteer.co.