Hi Michael,

I found your idea and your analysis very interesting!
However one aspect that would have been certainly worth to mention is that for most of the interviewed runners, English isn't their mother tongue. I'm not necesserally arguing that this fact may actually change the obtained results; but the importance of the language is often impressive, at any level. For having been a bilingual child I often feel like a different person depending on the language, and the race analysis sound sometimes very different to my (also bilingual) trainers when using one language instead of the others, sounding possibly much harder and more negative in one, and softer in the other, althought my emotions keep the same. Interviewing once in English a runner for UO, I was accompanied by a person speaking the same language than this runner, who also spoke with him/her. It was astonishing how different our feedback sounded. I was told that this runner "didn't mean that at all", just for having not choosen the same words to express her/his feelings in her mother thongue or in English... This fact was indeed already very well illustrated in the literature about translation. And as already written - as well for beginners than for bilingual people, althought of course to a lesser extent.

Best wishes and congrats for your interesting articles!
A linguistic-freak ;)
 

Voting for the Orienteering Achievement of 2008 is now open here:

http://poll.worldofo.com/poll2008.html

and will be open until December 9th. Official Press Release about voting will be given Friday November 28th at 1200 CET at World of O / Ultimate Orienteering, but as November 28th has started, we have already opened up for voting for those wanting to be early;)
 

Lucie. The language issue makes something like this little exercise difficult. Which is why I wouldn't make too much of it. That said, it is interesting that the elite orienteers look similar in the spreadsheet (with a couple of clear exceptions). I guess I'd describe analyzing these interviews as a fun game, but a game that might hint at some interesting characteristics of how people think.

I thought it was particularly interesting that one runner was a clear outlier in terms of the frequency of "negative emotions."

A better experiment for this sort of analysis might be to focus on texts written by native English speakers. I could probably look at Attackpoint logs as a source. Maybe something for another day.

Michael
 

The software is actually fantastic :)
It shows something I felt after reading the interviews - just it used some statistics and rules. I wanted to check if I had been right thinking who is that outlier - and ... Yes, I was :)
 

Nenad, I was a bit surprised to see such a clear outlier. I wasn't really surprised about who it was.

Michael