Labels for Distances

Michael Posted: 8 February 2009, 2:51 PM   One of the better things we have done in NZ orienteering is introduce neutral words for navigational difficulty. "Easy" meant different things to different people whereas you have to look up what "White" means and thereby can't avoid the definition. I'd say we need a similar set of neutral words for the various length disciplines, after a sprint course which called for 4-min-mile pace to achieve the 12-minute time. And a middle day whose lowest win-time (red classes) was 38-57. Like the difficulty labels we don't get much help from the IOF, they expunged the word "classic" because they didn't want it to have any special status, changed the "short" to "middle" and "classic" to long regardless of the fact that many countries including NZ run longer races from time to time. "Sprint" one might suppose to be the shortest of all but the Russians have invented a formula with a 2-min win time. What should it be? Honda, Toyota etc? Then you could run the "Red Toyota course". Animal or bird names? Perhaps as a forest sport tree species. To be politically correct of course p radiata wouldn't be allowed, they'd have to be natives.   Alistair Posted: 8 February 2009, 10:53 PM   The term Ultra-long is used quite regularly over here for races of 1:50+   nick Posted: 9 February 2009, 7:07 AM   you could use numbers and kilometers; for eg: 10 kilometers   addison Posted: 9 February 2009, 7:10 AM   Or you could use "EWT" and as nick points out. Howsabout actually putting in accurate climbs! Whamo all the detail we need.   mick finn Posted: 9 February 2009, 7:14 AM   Or number of bananas needed to avoid calorie deficit   HeadHoncho Posted: 9 February 2009, 1:56 PM   Brilliant idea. Some suggestions: To honour the pioneer of Sprint O, Course 1 of sprints becomes Red Wood. Middles - Red Robin as Tania was/is really good at them. To recognise Neil's long prowess (his O prowess that is, his other prowess ain't that long) and combine it with his golf skills, red long becomes Red Shank. Other possiblities include White Ash, White Kane, and Yellow Fin (after Mick and the cowardly tendencies of his birth country's cricketers - sorry, low blow I know). For some reason I think of Jamie when suggesting Orange Roughy.   mick finn Posted: 10 February 2009, 2:03 AM   touche - howzat!   Michael Posted: 16 February 2009, 12:49 PM   Now we've got the joking out of the way, on with the serious point. Distance and EWT are unsuitable event labels since a typical event will have a range of courses, and various venues will have different distances to achieve them. On reflection, I think we need to work within the IOF nomenclature. Hence "long" means 90min EWT for M21E and other (lesser) win times as defined in the NZ rules. "Middle" at IOF level means 30-35min EWT, but we've got a complicated thing which depends on whether there are one or two in a day (two has largely gone by the board) and whether you are elite or not. Mostly they are expressed as a percentage of the long distance, which means that class-course groupings can stay the same but has the anomaly that some non-elite classes have longer EWTs than elite. Let's use the word "short" to mean 30-35min for all classes; and work out what the new class-course groupings should be. "Sprint" at IOF level means 12-15min EWT. Our rules are good here, an example of what the wording could become for Middle. But perhaps to save effort, we've been getting just 3 courses and this means win times have been rather more than 15min for many classes. Just how much harder is it to create a couple of shorter courses? There is usually no difficulty variation on a campus. I think that these overlong "sprints" might be pandering to the "distance per dollar" lobby. In which case why don't we define a 20-25min EWT discipline? The word "short" isn't used for anything these days, so we could use that as a label. Now I come to what our rules call "multi-day distance". This is a rather obtuse label for 70-90% of long, but in fact many single-day events are this length, eg OYs. The word "classic" is no longer used by the IOF, why don't we adopt it for this? Those percentages might need to be narrowed down a bit. That covers most of what we do at the moment. I'll leave for later the question of whether "ultra-" is the right label for something that is only a little bit outside the norm. Any comment? I admit that I've broadened the discussion a bit beyond mere labels into a change in what the middle represents for many people. This isn't new, I remember a well-argued report by Terry Brighouse many years ago along these lines.   Jamie Posted: 16 February 2009, 2:03 PM   I think the current rules are fine. There maybe could be more discretion in the winning times to give planners the opportunity to have slightly shorter or longer middles and especially sprints if this was the best way of making the most of an area. The middle distance times at Waitangi would definitely be at the top end of this discretion.