Formby Full - NO EOD

[pete.owens]

Isn't this all the wrong way of looking at the issue. We provide a range of courses so people can choose which course they want to run - and if they prefer shorter courses then that really isn't a problem.

The problem is shortage of M21s (the age class that you would normally expect to see running black courses).

[SeanC]

Yes, of course you're right.

But classic orienteering events in remote forests seem the hardest to sell to M21's. Why not go for an easier market, probably slightly older men and women aged 35-50?* These seem a more natural market for traditional forest orienteering: more likely to have a car, less likely to be looking for a social life with their sport, more likely to want a long lonely peaceful battle with the forest, too old for impact sports and likely to be looking for a way to remove some middle age spread.

The demographic I'm talking about is the Mamil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamil) and whatever the female equivalent is.

These people enjoy a challenge, even if others think they're not up to it. Clubs can help them prepare technically and physically for whatever challenge our sport might want to throw at them, even the black course at West Malling County Park.

*Still 10-15 years younger than most adult orienteers.

[Gross]

Why not go for an easier market, probably slightly older men and women aged 35-50

And watch the sport f*****g die

Sean C.... have you ever actually been in a classic forest or just pottered around Engerland?

[andypat]

Or you could market it as training for Mountain Marathons for W45s...http://www.basoc.org.uk/documents/results/2014-09-28-alvie/

[Gnitworp]

Sean C.... have you ever actually been in a classic forest or just pottered around Engerland?

He successfully 'pottered' around the Black at Holmbury last Sunday - winning time 110 min.
It would have been reasonably challenging even for someone from Scoterland

[greywolf]

Black courses aren't (supposed to be) any more technically difficult than Green, Blue or Brown, just longer. In most of GB (including much of Scotland) they are all long light greens anyway). But the actual technical challenge depends on speed, and the majority of orienteers (i.e. all but the elite) aren't fit enough to race (rather than bimble) a black course - at any given event there's more technical challenge in racing a Green course at 6mins/km than pootling round Black at 10 mins/km - if folk want to do the latter then fine, but it doesn't mean they're doing "better" orienteering

[Glucosamine]

I used to enjoy the days when courses were correlated with classes, but now that it is a guessing game who will do which course on the day in all but pricier events, we seem to be in a world where (supposedly) TD5 courses are more like a choice of track distances at a vets league track event. Just as there is no intrinsic merit in a middle distance result compared to a sprint (or a throw compared to a jump), so a very short green or a black do now seem to be valid choices for everybody. Why stop at black as a pseudo-LongO course, other than the need to get people back before courses need to close? Or why not offer a TD5 course with a four minute winning time? Alternatively, could we not have a standard weighting factor for course length / height and publish an additional results table for ALL the TD5 courses for an event?