LETTERS

Increasing Orienteering Exposure

I’ve just returned from a visit to my local GP. His waiting room reading material was so atrocious I was forced to read a Women’s Day, a parachuting magazine and an aviation safety magazine. I wished I had taken my copy of The Australian Orienteer which was at home on the top of my reading pile. It was then I thought this might be an avenue to give wider exposure to our sport. As much as I enjoy re-reading your informative articles, on my next visit I intend to add a few of your recent issues to their magazine pile. If we all ‘recycle’ this valuable advertising resource to any ‘captive audience’ we must increase the exposure of our sport. Cliff Howard (Qld)

Orienteer Cover (March’06)

Congratulations on a cover that picks up another aspect of Orienteering. It’s a great picture.

Mary Jane Mahony (NSW)

To maintain is to succeed

Only 17 per 10,000 in the ACT are Orienteers (Bob Mouatt AO p47, Dec’05) and the figures would be much smaller in other parts of Australia (except Pt. Lincoln and Orange?). Bob doesn’t need to apologise for this. Australians are not ‘forest people’ (like Scandinavians) and for all our efforts we’re never going to do better than this. We don’t need to cringe for being a minor sport (as others see us). For competitive types and the elites it is a major sport demanding more skill and fitness than in most other sports. Orienteering is just too hard for most in Australia and, I suspect, the US, etc. and even in many parts of Europe it’s hard to keep up the numbers (an ex-Polish elite estimates that 1% only is a good long-term response from school programs). Many give Orienteering a try but few make it their No. 1 sport. The drop out rate in the ACT is around 100 members per year (approx 20%) which is probably much the same elsewhere in Australia. All credit to Bob and his team for maintaining 500 members by recruiting. He (and the rest of us enthusiasts) was looking for massive growth in the 80’s and beyond, but that’s not how life is here. We were fooled by the growth of the late 70’s when Orienteering was ‘discovered’ by us outdoor types. The numbers have plateaued (see ‘50 Golden Years’ p25… A History of Orienteering in SA and NT). John Lyon (SA)

Course Overprinting

In 2004 Orienteering Australia released a Colour Swatch for map printing including digital printing. This contained reference colours for all map symbols and course overprinting. The latter is defined as PMS purple with the recommended CMYK combination for digital maps to produce a purple colour. Unfortunately this reference is often ignored and Magenta or other redder/pinker colour variations are used for courses with the reason given that these colours are more prominent for the majority of orienteers. However not using the correct colour is against the spirit of fairness for Orienteering as this colour makes distinguishing the course (circles, numbers and lines) extremely difficult for colour blind orienteers (~5% of males and a smaller percentage of females). Event organisers need to remember that how the map looks to them is not how it may appear to colour blind orienteers. Guidelines have been developed for colour presentation in Web sites, so that optimal colours are used for colour blindness. One of these sites www.etre.com/tools/ colourblindsimulator/ enables conversion of a small image to the appearance for both “protanopia” and “dueteranopia” colour blindness (both have problems in the red-green/ yellow-green spectrum) and the rare “tritanopia”. Converting an image (preferably a scanned version of the map with proposed overprinting) highlights the problems colour blind orienteers have with magenta and other less purple colours. Some appear identical to brown in particular so that in complex map areas the course overprinting is easily lost in map detail. This can be exacerbated when control circles are the same thickness on 1:10 000 maps as index contours. Use of the correct purple adds enough blue content to the course symbols to appear “blue” to the colour blind orienteer and thus more separate from the majority of the map symbols. In map overprinting, please use the correct purple colour which will be visible to all orienteers rather than magenta or other variations although the latter may be best for the majority.

Robin Uppill (SA)

Ageing and health

Thanks to Steve Bird for his fascinating article ‘Orienteering, ageing and health’ (p42, AO Dec’05). It’s encouraging to read that we can contribute to our health by continuing our orienteering training for as long as possible. The graph of orienteering speed against age correlated so well with my graph of metres per sec against age since 1988 (when I was 51) on a timed run on the same 4km route (on tracks, through the bush with significant climb). The actual readings in m/s were different from Steve’s but the downward gradient was as good as identical with the little dips observable at 60, 65 and near 70. Whoever set the age group cut-offs in the IOF was either lucky or smart… did they have Steve’s graph? But how did Steve measure O speed which seems to defy definition with varying terrain running speeds, route choices and the uniqueness of the once-off run in every competition? I’ll have to go to the Sports Institutes library and consult Steve’s reference No1.

He makes the point that at our age it is still possible to increase our aerobic strength through training. This explains the higher reading I recorded just before WMOC at Asiago in 2004 (the increased fitness did not help a lot as a couple of little navigational errors put me way down against the best!) I have an article in my coaching file by Dr Peter Reaburn which seems to confirm Steve’s point. “Older athletes lose muscle mass particularly after 60-70 years of age. Strength training has been shown to improve muscle size in both older men and women”. When one looks at Steve’s graph it is easy to say that we don’t like this ageing process but I’ve been reminded that the alternative may be worse! The article raises a couple of questions. If we lose up to 1.5% of our running speed each year then a 65 year-old will have a 6% advantage over a 69 year-old. That could explain a lot. Then again, does our thinking ability slow down commensurate with our running speed? Going more slowly ought to reduce the % of silly navigation errors. I’m not convinced. I wonder if any research has been done on whether we think more slowly the older we get. John Lyon (SA)