EOC Relay

[mat-d]

maybe you are right guest88, but still, where do you want to find these other athletes? most fast runners will not always be the best at navigation at world level.

[Guest88]

Well there are possible answers to your question - not saying that I advocate doing this, but I suppose once you have filtered out all of the junior squad that don't match up to the time trial standard that you are setting there will be lots of spaces up for grabs.

Then you could furtively hand out fliers at junior national cross country finals that there are spaces free on tours etc. for the fastest cross country runners that apply (or just get our existing juniors who do natioanl cross country to advertise to their pals).

Give them a spatial skills test, as they will need some of this as well.

Give them a year in squad / organised lifts to events, training to see if it works out. Some you will lose no doubt, and some won't have the navigational ability to cut the mustard at international level...but when you find someone who does then she/he is your future top echelon international...you only need to find one every two years and you will have a strong international side, and there are plenty of places every year in the junior squad for us to be able to gamble with some of them.

[bolder]

Guest88s plan is interesting. (though not saying I advocate it) I would just like to post a few thoughts.
Their plan might just work for selecting urban sprint or park race runners but I really think it won't work for middle or certainly long distance orienteering races. National standard cross country runners might have the speed endurance for 30mins but unless specific marathon runners wouldn't be able to cope with a world class classic. Its not just the distance but the terrain we orienteer through. cross country runners generally complain if a 'cross' course is not flat manicured grass! Its so much different running through marshy/moorland terrain and different muscle groups are used.
Personally I feel that unless taught very early (less than 10) you are born with good spatial skills. People with good spatial skills are not necessarily children whose parents are orienteers though, so how do we identify them.
Also for 'selection' what sort of track/cross country/road times would you set?

[awk]

It's all very well filtering out runners with time trial results etc. etc., but the bottom line is that we're working off a very small pool. Indeed, given how small that pool is, I'm amazed we achieve the results we do, and all credit to our team and squad structure for regularly doing so well.

It's all very well Guest88 saying the system is biased towards orienteering families, but take those out of the system and you currently don't have any junior structure to speak of. And quite a few of those orienteers' children can actually run - after all they often have the genetic background and lifestyle to encourage it.

In fact, I would suggest this is one strand to develop further: Mrs H has shown that family based orienteering could be a major source of recruitment and means of broadening the base.

Yes, you could talent spot, but that is a very expensive route to follow - you're going to have to use some fairly substantial incentives to encourage people to move from their favoured sport. It has been shown to work for some major sports, but mostly those with a lot of cash to throw at it. You are still working off a very narrow base. It also smacks of short termism, with very little kickback to the sport as a whole.

To my mind, the real problem lies at club level. There just isn't the grass roots coaching structure feeding into the regional and then national system. We've, largely of necessity, gone down a top down route, with a great national squad structure, a curate's egg regional junior (but no intermediate/senior) structure and a pretty dreadful club structure.

Just look at this year's British relays. Just three W14- teams, and two of those from one school!! Pathetic. (You want to promote orienteering to cross-country, when BOF refuses to present even medals to the largest junior relay class? Laughable.).

It's the clubs where the real gap between us and the other successful European nations lies. So - if you want to develop the national squad further, put club development right at the heart of British orienteering development (and at the centre of BOF strategy), because whilst development and strategy is focused elsewhere (and look at the distribution of professional staff and their focus) British orienteering will always struggle to compete with the big boys.

[Guest88]

awk> I agree with what you are saying although I do think time trial (over terrain not on grass)and spatial skills tests might help in singling out which of the juniors have the requisite underlying talent to succeed at the higher level - whereas their orienteering results at junior level will be quite affected by how much opportunity they have had to go orienteering.

bolder> don't agree with your generalisation about x-country athletes, simply because there are top level x-country athletes who have had top positions in classic orienteering races.

[Barny of Blandford]

Many of the youngsters who start cross country and athletics between the ages of eleven and fourteen are rather 'ropey' initially - some survive and some drop out.
The important thing is that they receive regular coaching in the basics and initially many clubs teach them a wide variety of skills and events. Then they start of specialize. Among the skills taught is the basic of running and pacing.
Perhaps we forget this in orienteering and need to remember to teach this at the same time as orienteering skills
Also I find it difficult to understand why we expect people in orienteering to be good at sprint events, middle distance and classic - in athletics it is unlikely that the same person will be outstanding at say 800, 3000 and 10000. There are however often exceptions. Surely we need to teach orienteers different skills for different distances - also dare I say it that we might need to teach some planners and controllers that they are different events and need different approaches in the planning of these courses
I hope this post is not being too controversial

[awk]

Not controversial at all from my point of view Barney - although I think there are fundamental skills that cross all the disciplines.

I think your point about different stages is an important one. Quite often in orienteering, junior success at least in the early teens can be based on physical maturity: those who grow bigger and stronger earlier on having an advantage. M/W14s is the class where this seems to happen most. But quite often it's the later maturers who turn out to be the more runner types - early maturers more the rugby types. So, if we're not careful, we could bias selection the wrong way (one of my arguments with age class competition). And what about the youngster who takes their training carefully as they grow, as compared to those who just go for it and very possible knock themselves out of the running too early?

There is also differential mental maturing, both technical and emotional, to throw into the melting pot as well.

Which is to say that selecting youngsters early on is to my mind rather too subject to too many variables to be reliable. What we need is to keep the net as broad as possible, which again is where clubs come in.

[rocky]

guest88. you seem obsessed with finding this *natural talent* for running at the expense of existing orienteers with *natural talent* for navigation.

since you picked me (murray strain) out as having a strong performance in the squad time trial, and hence i am "in" in your system, let me tell you a bit about me, where i came from.

i never had a great talent for athletics or cross country at school, i was never fastest in my year and i think the highest i placed it district level was 7th in the East Lothian Schools XC. i believe there were many runners quicker than me in my year at o. and i definitely would not have stood out in a time trial (just remembered there is a time trial course at lagganlia, some 1km sections along tracks and through terrain to compare your running speed in each, i definitely wasn't the fastest, lagganlia 97)

however i stuck at it, trained hard through my junior years, listening to the training advice the squad gave but also talking to others in the norwegian and swedish squads about their training. i believe the year i made a difference was my first one in edinburgh, getting good regular training with Ewan McCarthy and Clive Parry but also doing my own key sessions. at the end of that year i ran a couple of races the uni xc club put on and did quite well, so after the summer and my final jwoc they hunted me down and persuaded me to run a couple of xc races for them.

i did pretty well, coming 5th in the scottish uni xc champs and for the next two seasons i incorporated xc races in my winter training. this winter i fully committed to running a structured xc season along with an increase in my quality mileage training. i was rewarded with 11th place in the scottish national xc champs.

my point is you don't need to show natural talent as a junior to have the physical capability required to compete at senior elite level. it just takes hard work.

this reminds me of a conversation i had last year with Ray Ward, Claire's husband. Ray comes from a running background but went out to PWT with Claire. while he was out there he got talking to PWT legend Yuri Omeltchenko, and asked him what his 3km PB was. 8:30, which might sound effing fast to you (and me, my PB is ~9.00), but Ray was shocked it was that slow. in his eyes anyone with the commitment could run that fast if they really wanted to train hard for it.

i think disregarding people who "aren't fast enough" is pretty ridiculous. disregard people who don't want to get faster, yes, but if someone wants it enough, then they can have it.

-m

[Tatty]

Well said Murray!

[J.Tullster]

Murrays post is very ineteresting and just shows what can be done. Also, basic running speed doesn't translate into top results in orienteering every time. You could take Carsten Jorgenson as an example, now obviously he is a world class orienteer, I'm not sure what all his best results have been, but I don't think he's ever won WOC, etc even though he has been European XC Champion, and has run 27.54 for 10km (NR at the time) so was most likely the fastest "runner" in the field. Saying this, I think time trials, more running coaching etc should be focussed on more in junior orienteering.

[Blanka]

Guest 88- i think the czech junior team have to be able to run to a certain standard on the track to keep their place on the team.

Yes, that is the case.

It's 3000m in 11:35 for the girls and 5000m in 16:50 for the boys. You have to run the time between 1st January and 1st June of year in which JWOC is run (this year selections for JWOC are due 6th June, and I think the selection race is the weekend just preceding that, i.e. 3rd/4th June). You have to run the time at an official athletic meeting (i.e. not in training) or at a time when someone from the official Junior team leaders etc..

To some extent the Czech approach follows Gross'/Didsco's in terms of saying so when a selected team has done badly. Within a month or so of the JWOC, the report for that year, however damning, appears on the junior representation website for anyone to read and I can certainly tell you it's not very complimentary in places. I am not saying that's very sensitive (especially in terms of juniors) and don't necessarily agree with it in all cases, but I would say that in this case Gross has a point: maybe *most* British people are too polite to be negative about results of their athletes and will pussyfoot around saying 'oh what great results they were' when there's not all that much to be proud of?


Going back to the Czech junior success, I would say that it lies in the kids starting very early on and with having a much higher density of orienteers in the first place. It is very common to have summer camps in the Czech Republic with the summer holidays being 2 months long (I have been an instructor on a canoeing one for a few years so also see it from the organisational side). These camps may often have a theme, which could be orienteering. At the Prague Easter event I saw an advert for one aimed at 7-15 year olds (from beginners to advanced) - but the main difference to British training tours is that kids will not only do some orienteering (a bit) they will also do plenty of camping, cycling, outdoor games etc etc. so that introduction to orienteering, whilst early, is gentle.

But perhaps this is something that's impossible to recreate in Britain for two main reasons:
- the camps are often run by a town O club (with older juniors and the M/W21's as instructors) for their own juniors, maybe joined by some more local clubs, i.e. there are enough juniors of the same age in each town's club to make it feasible
- the sueing culture in GB means running such a camp becomes a huge burden from a bureaucratic point of view

[DesignatedDriver]

i will probably get absolutely slated for this, but:

training hard will only take you so far

i believe that what makes someone the best in their given sport, is natural talent.

heres my thinking - two people were to meet up and do exactly the same training for two years. hence they would be as fit as each other. i know everyone will agree with me, that if they were to have a race, they would not finish together. one would be slightly faster. i put this down to natural talent.


but as for cutting out everyone who doesn't perform well in a time trial - that is a ridiculous way to find a good orienteer.

what will good orienteers be good at? you guessed it, orienteering.

[Guest88]

>Murray

Well I am sorry for distracting you from your revision with this...I'm actually not obsessed with the idea, it was more an exploratory discussion to suggest some possibilities in response to Gross's questions about why we aren't getting as good results as he is hoping for... as you noticed before, I did put caveats in my previous posts to indicate that I was moving further than normal from my comfort zone on stuff that I know about and to indicate that they weren't positions I was obsessively attached to...

I don't agree with your statement that if anyone wants it enough, they can have it - with regards to fast x-country speed. I do think it depends on your genetic makeup and physique.

On the other hand, if it is not felt to be possible (and I don't claim to be an expert on this), to pick out sufficiently well who is going to be fast at senior level, then you still need to increase the overall number of juniors in the game, as awk says above, and as I was saying myself in previous posts in the other thread - 'European Championships'.

[Nails]

oh and another variable:

The speed at which you orienteer is different to your speed (on say track/xc).

The maximum speed you can run while getting the orienteering right. Everybody's is different. I know my maximum o-speed is very nearly my maximum speed. I don't train much for xc or specifically for the GB time trial. The GBTT showed that my pace was considerably down on people like murray/gg etc but i think my o-speed is probably much closer.

Yes the GBTT is a good tool for guaging your speed round a relatively flat area (and not much was in terrain) against other runners. It showed me what i knew -i've not trained for xc! Also it was interesting to see people like Oli quite a way down -now he doesn't train for xc either -but his max o-speed is up there with anyone.

What i'm trying to say is that flat speed is useful (esp in sprint distance and easy (not rough) terrain) but it doesn't completely transfer over as o-speed.

well thats my opinion anyway

[ER]

This subject fascinates me as Nails points out there is no point running faster than you are able to orienteer. However maximum performance is attained when the fastest runner is able to navigate at that speed. So an orienteer who comes out of a time trial with a relatively low performance but whose results indicate the orienteering skills are making up for the slower running speeds has potential to improve their results by improving their running speeds.

Improvement can only come by pushing both sides all the time; if one side goes ahead you have to work on the other so they are back in balance without losing the gain on one of the sides.

Big however though; I think the above only applies once a total competence in orienteering skills has been learnt and probably only to elite orienteers. To come to orienteering from a running background can be so difficult and my experience is that children and juniors need all the emphasis placed on being coached in skill development and practice, otherwise they just run fast believing that is going to win them the day but all it does is lead to frustrating mistakes.

Having said that if you are a good runner as a junior you will have an advantage providing you have good skills. I think more research is needed into this whole topic as to how to maximise the two elements of fitness and skill. It is fairly straightforward (but hard work) to achieve an improvement in running times, not though may I suggest is it as easy to develop the skills to meet those improved running times.

And finally - the British team brought home a silver medal from EOC and are to be congratulated. All will have given 100%. I am dead proud of all the Senior Squad and all who get them their including those who are pushing from below - their commitment to their sport is an inspiration to my household and will continue to be so.