Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Saturday, July 24, 2004 Some quick notesJapanRandy wrote about the Japanese team at the European Champs. Reading Randy's comments spurred a couple of thoughts. A couple of years ago the Japanese O' Federation invited (and paid for?) Bjornar Valstad and Hanne Staff to come to Japan and participate in training meetings in terrain relevant for the 2005 WOC with the Japanese team. The idea was to show them how we set up our training and our daily lives in. We held some lectures for the junior and senior national teams. We also had some events for "regular" runners and talked about orienteering in Norway, organization of clubs, recruiting, mapping, etc. Valstad-Staff's trip is written up here (in Norwegian, but with some photos and maps for non-Norwegian readers). Peer nations Randy wrote: Are the Japanese serious, and could they be the next "peer nation" poised to leave the US behind...? This reminded me of something I was thinking when I put together my set of "peer nations." I included a bunch of factors that didn't have a lot to do with O' performance. For example, for each nation, I asked "is it in Europe?" I reasoned that non-European nations had something in common. I was trying to get at ways of identifying nations that had similarities in the problems they faced in international orienteering. For example, I assumed that Japan and the U.S. have something in common because both nations are a long way from Europe. The main reason I put together my peer nation list was to have a tool for looking at results in WOCs. But, it occurred to me that another way to use the list would be to get runners and coaches from the peer nations together to talk about the problems they face and the solutions they come up with. The U.S. can learn a lot from studying Scandinavian nations, but we can probably also learn a lot from studying peer nations. Some links worth a look The Swedish 5-Days, Oringen, just finished. Check out some video clips and look at maps from the "super elite" category. Check out some nice maps from Mike Waddington. posted by Michael | 2:43 PM 
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