okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Friday, August 30, 2002
What is relevant running terrain?
Relevant running terrain for an orienteer would be the type of terrain an O' course typically goes through. A guy named Christer Johansson looked at ten World Cup races from 1988. He studied the winners' routes and measured the portion of the course the winner ran in different types of terrain: forest, trails, open areas, marshes, thick areas, felled areas and stony ground.
On average, 64 percent of the winners' routes were in the forest.
On average, 17 percent of the winners' routes were on trails.
On average, 8 percent of the winners' routes were in open areas.
On average, roads made up only 1 percent of the winners' routes.
There was one race that was an outlier. The World Cup race in Hong Kong had just 5 percent forest and 68 percent trails.
Looking at Johansson's analysis, it looks like an orienteer ought to be doing a lot of running training in the forest. But, that is only true if running in the forest is significantly different from running on the roads or trails. Is it?
