Discussion: Americans...

...are very good at orienteering in America. You'll be fine once you get them back to Europe.

It's really different to back home - aside from a couple of sand dune places there's nowhere here that's that complex but also that fast. And our sand dunes have a much higher visibility than these woods. It was really cool to be out in them.

graeme>>I've had similar thoughts on Americans, myself included. Why do you think the effect is that great? We have a large variety of terrain that we get to experience here in the States, and yet I feel like a lot of US WOC runners underperform when they race overseas, specifically at WOC. What can explain that?

1) Do they under-perform compared to their best, their mean or their median performances?
2) The terrain I've been on here so far this autumn has been great, but all has a similar feel - mostly dry, often little veg, with either high-vis, highly-runnable forest or thick veg, not much in between.
3) When you do travel to other terrain types in the US, does that affect mean/median performance? Who are you comparing with? Foreigners or US orienteers?

Subtle differences in terrain can make a big difference too. Boris, you learnt to orienteer really well in Uppsala terrain, eventually, but AQ was still beating you in Stockholm (no shame in that). Knowing subconsciously where you can safely place your feet without looking can probably shave a minute or two off your race time, for example.

Erm, well, at the risk of nobody speaking to me ever again, I think you're all too slow. You have such great technical terrain that mistakes can be very costly. Combined with the small fields it maybe leads to running a bit safe, knowing losing a couple of mins on the running is worth it to avoid 5 mins of errors. Which works fine in the US (as I found to my cost as the 5min errors mounted up!) but not quite in Europe. Also, for small country runners to qualify for finals at WOC, its often enough to be fast enough to park yourself on the back of someone good and hang on (you maybe don't get to practice that in the US where one of the big attractions is running alone in the woods). All that technical skill counts for nothing.

When I last lived in the US, I was pretty much the fastest endurance runner there (if no match for you guys technically). No M40 should ever be that.

But then, I never ran internationally, so maybe I'm just burbling.

Neil - little veg... can't wait to see you this weekend! :)

And yes, I also think we are all much too slow.