okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Saturday, May 23, 2009
US WOC team ages - 2009 edition
I took my annual (or nearly annual) look at the ages of the US WOC team members. This year's team averages 32.4 years with the median of 30 years. For comparison, last year's team average was 31.4 and median was 30.5.
This year's team is split in half. Half the team have little WOC experience while half have a lot of WOC experience.
5 of the US Team have a total of 7 starts in WOC races (based on maprunners' WOC database). The other 5 runners have a total of 105 WOC starts.
Putting that that 105 WOC starts in context...that means the average for those five runners is 21 WOC starts. Here are the number of WOC races the five most experienced US WOC team runners have: 13, 13, 20, 23, and 36. How many WOC races do you think Mikell Platt and Sharon Crawford have? Mikell had 19. Of course, it is much easier to get a lot of WOC starts these days than it was back when Mikell and Sharon started. Back then, the WOC was every other year and you couldn't start more than 2 races in any given WOC.