Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006 Why just 3000 meters?From a discussion at Attackpoint about running speed...Very interesting that the Norwegians use the 3000m as the test. Seems very short and fast to me - but probably important these days with so many shorter races at WOC than there used to be! I'm pretty sure I know why the Norwegians use 3000 meters as a test distance. Obviously, it is easy to control and easy to compare times from year to year and place to place. But, maybe as important a reason is the graph below (lifted from Staff-valstad.com).  The graph shows you that at about 9 minutes you're running at about 95-98 percent aerobic. That's about the same as if you run for a longer time. If you run shorter, the aerobic portion declines. But if you run longer the aerobic portion doesn't really change. So a test run of about 9 minutes is the minimum you can use and get an aerobic/anaerobic mix that is just like a much longer race. There is no need to go any longer. A longer test run would work, but it'd doesn't really give you any more information and it is just more draining. You could do a good warm up, run a 3000 meter test, jog a bit, and still have plenty left for a second session. But, if the test is 10K, that second session might not work. Of course, I'm just speculating. Maybe I'm wrong. posted by Michael | 6:15 PM 
Comments:
I wrote an article for one of our running magazines a few months ago, summarising various orienteering reserach on anaerobic performance (all from Sci Jo of O). You won't be able to read it because it's in Hebrew.
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One of my conclusions was that good (fast) orienteers have anaerobic capacity similar to 3,000m runners and therefore that distance is a good predictor of orienteering speed. As it's based on existing research, I suppose lots of people know that. # posted by
 : 11:43 PM |
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