Orienteering and young families

[mharky]

AWK, I know you like to disagree, but did you even read what I wrote? I wasn't saying anything about the muscular-skeletal damage caused by running surface, I was talking about ones ability to run on various surfaces. And I think you'll find that terrain speed deteriorates with age more rapidly than track speed.

[EddieH]

As a deteriorating M60 I can confirm that you are quite right Mharky, or is it that I don't do enough training

[graeme]

mharky is right about the road vs terrain. Which helps explain why he's wrong about urban being easy. I think it was Oyvin Thon who said "there's no such thing as a difficult control, only inappropriate speed". Whoever, it's a great observation, and older people can't reach an inappropriate speed (read, oxygen debt) in the woods any more. Which is why for them (er, I mean us) urban has become a challenging discipline.

[mharky]

Maybe that's why I think it's easy then. My track speed is pretty poor, but my terrain speed is pretty good.

[EddieH]

I believe he said "There is no such thing as a difficult control in orienteering. What is hard is to assess the speed you can afford to approach it."

I took these words to heart in Scandinavia in 1987 and instantly improved as I had previously run under the strange misconception that to stop and look at the map was a failure

[awk]

AWK, I know you like to disagree, but did you even read what I wrote?

I always do Mharky, surprisingly carefully. (So sorry, especially to SeanC, for the longer post - but I do want to answer your points properly):

I wasn't saying anything about the muscular-skeletal damage caused by running surface, I was talking about ones ability to run on various surfaces. And I think you'll find that terrain speed deteriorates with age more rapidly than track speed.

Which is why I said the rest of what I said. The fact that I'm slower through terrain than I was matters hardly at all** (however, I do take Graeme's last point). - almost all my races in terrain I'm running against my age group, and we're all slowing up together (at different rates perhaps!), and I don't have a problem with that on the occasions I run against M21s etc - I'm quite content to be running lower down the lists.

It may be that some people enjoy urban for the reasons you cite, and I can only speak personally, but having talked it over with OH she's in agreement, as are one or two others I've discussed it with: the reason we enjoy and run urban orienteering is not what you suggest, but because of the increased variety they provide (they're also easier to access, and we find them more sociable too). We've been orienteering over 40 years, and started finding much orienteering rather ordinary: too many events on familiar areas often with not overly exciting courses. Urban orienteering has helped create a more interesting mix, not only bringing a variety of different styles of orienteering to the fore, but also a whole set of new areas, emphasised more in this part of the world where there is rather more urban terrain than forest! As a result the whole sport (terrain and urban) is more enjoyable.

It's as simple as that (and, if you have read my previous posts you'll see that I'm repeating myself in saying so). I don't prefer urban to terrain, far from it, so all these arguments about finding it easier, technically or physically, etc etc are simply irrelevant, and in some cases plain wrong, at least in my case (I've never enjoyed 'easy' courses, generally preferring my terrain orienteering to be tough and technical; I find urban tougher on my body and longer to recover from - OH can't even run two urban days back to back because of joint issues).

Now all this may have been different living in Scotland or the Lakes, but we don't, and nor do most of the English. Which is why, in my opinion, the urban scene is taking off, not just amongst us older competitors, but amongst younger orienteers too, where the relative numbers are greater. My hope and expectation is that they will help bolster numbers in all forms of orienteering, including terrain - and I believe we're starting to see evidence that this is happening.

(**The one area I've found I do appreciate change is the issue of longer legs. Too many are simply boring, probably because I can't run them fast enough and once the decision has been taken it's all just about running them. Which is probably why I prefer middle-distance to long. Having said that, when they are planned well (e.g. Southern Champs last year) they can still provide great orienteering.)

[andypat]

(**The one area I've found I do appreciate change is the issue of longer legs. Too many are simply boring, probably because I can't run them fast enough and once the decision has been taken it's all just about running them. Which is probably why I prefer middle-distance to long. Having said that, when they are planned well (e.g. Southern Champs last year) they can still provide great orienteering.)

Agree with a lot of what AWK says, esp the point about long legs. I'm much faster on the road than terrain, mainly due to fitness but probably also a bit to do with confidence. In Urban and Sprint I experience the thinking part of the sport much more intensely due to the speed I am running at. In terrain I'm so much slower I find I have almost too much time to make decisions. Now clearly I need to get faster in terrain, but in the meantime Urban (and more especially sprint) I find gives me a different buzz than terrain.

[70plus]

In Urban and Sprint I experience the thinking part of the sport much more intensely due to the speed I am running at. In terrain I'm so much slower I find I have almost too much time to make decisions.

This is some way from the original topic of Families, but I cannot resist this point of terrain speed. Unlike AWK and Andypat, who clearly still have some speed for urban-O, I have never had that speed but am slowed down relatively less by 'terrain'. Hence I am not attracted to urban and sprint.

There used to be a rule of thumb saying that after 35 one loses 1% of speed per year; my own statistics seem to confirm that, roughly.

[pete.owens]

But it isn't so much speed over the ground that matters as speed over the map. Even if you couldn't run any faster on tarmac and manicured grass than you could through knee high brambles and brashings you will cover 2.5 cm on a 1:4000 sprint map in the time it would take to move 1cm on a 1:10000 map. What is more, there is usually a greater density of important detail on the sprint map and mid-leg mistakes can be very expensive.