okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Running in the terrain
Baekkelagets Sportklubb (a Norwegian orienteering club) has a terrain running test. You can check out the course by looking at the PDF of the map that you can find here.
One of the cool things about BSK's test is that they've got lots of historical data (which I've put in a Google spreadsheet or you can find from the link above as an Excel file.
Sometimes the test results are for two laps. I think they run the two laps back to back, to give an idea of how you tire. You'll also notice that they have split times. The splits are marked on the map and are different types of terrain. For example, the 4th split is for a 300 meter segment that goes down 60 meters. The 5th split is for a 300 meter split that climbs 60 meters.
Look through the historical data and you'll see some interesting names. You can compare Britt Volden to Anne Margrethe Hausken. How fast would a world class skier run the course and how does that compare to a world class orienteer? You can compare Hanne Staff to Bente Skari. How much better an uphill runner was Oyvin Thon compared to Oystein Sorensen? Well, you can get an idea by looking at the data.
