Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Monday, May 10, 2004 Course lengthsAn idea that comes up from time to time in U.S. orienteering is that our longest courses (M21) are too short. The basic argument is usually that at WOCs the courses are longer and that in Europe the courses are longer, hence we should have longer courses. Longer course will give people incentive to train more and will lead to stronger, tougher orienteers.That is the idea. I'm not convinced of the basic premise (i.e. that if our courses are longer U.S. orienteers will train better), but that is for a different day. For today, I'll just look at a bit of data. How long are M21 courses in the U.S.? I looked at the winning time for the A-meets I've run this spring. I've run 8 days of A-meets (I ran M21 in half of them). The winning M21 times for those 8 days ranged from 58 to 109 minutes. The average was 78 and the median was 72. How long are M21 courses in Sweden? I looked at the top M21 course for 49 races in Sweden in the last month. I didn't count any relays, but I counted every other race (so my list included some sprint races). The winning M21 times for those 49 races ranged form 12 to 120 minutes (the 120 minute race was a district long distance championship). The average was 53 and the median was 55. If you look at only races with winning times of at least one hour, you get a total of 19 races. Here are the winning times for those races: 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 73, 77, 80, 80, 81, 81, 82, 86, 89, 92 and 120. For the races with winning times of at least an hour, the median and average was 77. Just for fun, I also looked at the M21 elite and M21 "super elite" results from last year's Swedish 5-days. The winning times for M21E were: 71, 77, 88, 36 and 79. The elite ran only one day with a winning time over 80 minutes. The winning times for M21 super elite were: 17, 38, 80, 28 and 52. The super elite ran only one day with a winning time over 80 minutes. What do I make of this? First, I was a little surprised at the fact that the winning times in Sweden were less than I expected. If I had to guess, I'd have guessed the winning times would have been closer to 85 minutes. I don't know why I would have thought that. If I think back to when I lived there, I don't remember many courses with winning times that long. Second, it looks like Swedes run a lot more short courses. Of the 49 results I looked at, nearly a quarter of them had winning times right around 30 minutes (for the top M21 class). Third, if you exclude the short Swedish courses, the U.S. winning times are a bit shorter than the Swedish M21 winning times. But, not all that much. The median and average times are quite similar. Of course the level of competition in the U.S. is lower, so if the same competitors ran the U.S. courses the winning times for the U.S. would drop. But, I'd guess they'd drop on the order of maybe 10 minutes which isn't really all that big a difference (i.e. training for races with winning times around 75 minutes isn't much different for training for races with winning times around 85 -- or 65, for that matter). Fourth, if you include the short Swedish courses, the median and average winning times for Swedish courses are a good bit lower than the U.S. courses I looked at. posted by Michael | 7:53 PM 
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