Discussion: Mudders 1

A few related updates from the land of mudders: 1, 2, 3 (the last one contains a graphic video not suitable for all audiences).

A few comments...

• Mudders' fatality rate (events per competition person·hour) is about a half-order of magnitude smaller than it is for marathons, comparable with the overall rate for ultras, and is within a half-order of magnitude of the inevitable event per 700k hours for the population as a whole. This is clearly affected by the fact that most mudderingfolk are young and healthy; the age distribution of marathon participants is closer to that of the general population. If you age-adjust, I bet the statistic for mudders will instantly seem a lot scarier.



• I'm not sure if there is a more textbook example of an externality than overwhelming a local ER (first article) with your event participants.



• The trap of going holier-than-thou is all too enticing. We all must be mindful of the dangers present in events we participate in and organize, try our best to mitigate these dangers instead of ignoring them away "at least he passed doing what he enjoyed"-style, and be especially wary about public and media perception.

Another example from Washington: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Injured-mud-run...

I heard about the recent death, and that got me thinking that if orienteering events had the same participation rates as mudders, then we'd be hearing about deaths at our events, too.

That's exactly my point: the metric is events per competitor·hour. Marathons and ultras have large and long datasets, mudders have large datasets but have only been around for 2+ years, and orienteering has a very small number of competitor·hours, roughly 50k per year in the U.S. If the event rate were to be about one per million competitor·hours, which it is for ultras, we'd go about 20 years without an event, on average. Which more or less is the case. Even if our activity is twice as dangerous as say ultras (I don't think it is), or if we are twice as sloppy in caring for competitor safety as ultra organizers are (which we may well be), we may not know for a decade simply because of the smaller dataset.

Orienteering doesn't set out to seem scary so I think that (when we have enough data) it will be lower risk. In an otherwise unrelated thread, there is debate about whether hard-to-cross features should be declared out of bounds in the mapping specification. I know that some nations do so in their rules (AZ is the expert here) but this would apply to all nations that subscribe to the ISOM.

I realize that this thread is started in a Nort American context - we don´t have much "mudders" in Sweden - but if you´re looking at numbers there are lots of orienteering meets and orienteers in Sweden.

The occasional death happens at orienteering meets in Sweden, but they are most commonly related to heart failures (usually older people) and not the fault of the organizers. Offhand I can only remember one serious accident (runner impaled by a stick) that resulted in death.

Talking to health care staff at O-ringen they mention that there are lots of minor injuries (scratches, eye injuries, sprained ancles, blisters) but very seldom things that require hospital care.

Mudders propaganda on AP needs to be banned, especially to children

Slightly off the topic, but the comments after the komonews story are enlightening. People areblaming her, attacking her personally and absolving the organizers of any responsibility. I don't know the specifics well enough to comment, but those responses are telling.

Well yes. Comments on the Runner's World site, however, don't tend to blame the dead guy.

I detect a very interesting policy issue behind this. Contrast with the situation in NZ. Maybe a little less US style freedom results in a little more recreational freedom? Time for some kiwi commentary here are about their universal accident insurance scheme and its impact on adventure sports.