JWOC - the aftermath?

[redkite]

the Welsh Juniors have also run events, including the JK sprint day in bristol, that helped to fund an overseas tour. Remember Kris helping in the day. Bit ironic given the title of this thread.

[PhilJ]

I concur with RedKite, Kris was organising/putting out and collecting controls at last nights SBOC local event on Kilvey Hill - not the greatest of areas by a long way but lovely views of swansea bay.
Plus - thought I'd give him more plaudit even though he is ex-SBOC now (but we still hold our claim to him) there was some discussion over the fitness levels of the athletes, well at the Swansea 5Km race on Tuesday night Kris was second with a time of 16:03, the winner Dewi Griffiths (15:28) is a very good welsh international xc champion. 16:03 seems quick to me.

[graeme]

16:03 seems quick to me.

It isn't: even I could run faster than that as an M40!
Rocky ran sub 15 this year. I expect Kris could run a lot faster too...

[redkite]

rhodri's times for 5k are also a lot quicker than 16 min. Seem to remember him blasting round the Cardiff park run in close to 15 and then moaning that no competition to push him.

[PhilJ]

No real idea what Kris's PB is at 5km but noticed that he was comfortably in second place on the 5km run, maybe he can go faster.....out of interest what is your PB Graeme, mine is around 22 mins (that why I thought 16 was quick).

[Becks]

I think the boy can be forgiven the week after an awesome JWOC! Sure his PB is actually much quicker!

[graeme]

out of interest what is your PB Graeme, mine is around 22 mins (that why I thought 16 was quick).

The only 5k I ran in my 20s and 30s was 15:37, half a lap behind Rob Lee who (at that time) was off the pace for the GB squad. Jamie Stevenson was the fastest Scotsman one year at about 14:40. BOF's Steve Vernon is something like 14:11. The world record is 12:37.35.

That is quite fast. Though (returning to the theme), in a GB squad fundraiser Scotia, Rocky and I did a 10k "paarlauf" (trilauf?) at a faster pace than that, extracting lots of performance-related sponsorship money from people who thought 16mins was fast .

but I would struggle to get near 18 these days.

[DanH]

At the same time, using absolute position as a measure of performance outside of medal and podium places is misleading in orienteering. The analysis should look at the weighted time difference between the winner, medals, top 6, top 10, 20 etc. So, you could end up with, for instance, the runners in the 30-40 decile averaged 8% behind the top ten, and 12% behind the top 3 (not sure how realistic the example numbers are) in a particular format.

If the percentage time gap between the medals and the aslo-rans is increasing over time, then the overall programme is failing. If however the top national individual over time is decreasing the gap then that part of the programme is succeeding, even if they did not get a medal. Last finisher relative performance and spread of team performance are also good measure of the success of a programme in raising the bar and increasing the depth of competence.

Not sure this is really a valid way of looking at results in orienteering, it's not like a straight running race where the relative strength of the field is easy to gauge by the spread of times as there are so many more variables for performance.

At the classic race in Poland in 2004 I came somewhere in the 80s/90s and was closer to the winner than when I finished 29th in Switzerland the following year and I'm pretty sure the strength of the fields were fairly comparable. The race in Switzerland was so tough that it really spread the field out whereas Poland was relatively straightforward and fairly benign conditions.