okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Sunday, June 26, 2005
More on age and orienteering
A good way to get a handle on the relationship between age and orienteering performance would be to look at how a bunch of orienteers perform over their careers.
Two problems come up immediately. First, it isn't always easy to find out how old an orienteer is. I can often find a birthdate by poking around the web. But, not always. Second, orienteering performance is tricky to measure. The IOF world rankings look promising. But, the rankings haven't been around for all that long (I think they started in 2000), so putting together a timeline of performance is limited.
Park World Tour results might be a start. The PWT has been going since 1996, so the history is a bit longer than the IOF world rankings. The PWT web page includes the ages of most runners.
The graph above shows the sort of thing I'd like to do. It shows Rudolf Ropek's PWT seasons beginning with 1996, when Ropek was 26. (Performance is based on Ropek's season total compared to teh average of the top three).
If you had a whole bunch of these graphs, you could begin to make more sense of the age-performance relationship for orienteering.
Why would you do that? As Emil Faber said in 1904, "Knowledge is good."
posted by Michael |
6:51 PM
