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Couch to 5K Accountability Thread

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Skewbrow:
Last week I did two orienteering courses (the other one I only walked through) plus I cycled everywhere for a total of 70k+. I am inclined to discount those about 40 minute bike rides for the purposes of exercising. It has such low intensity. It might show a benefit (e.g. burn a lot of calories) if I did at least an hour and a half at a time. Vacation time here, so I just might...

Redball:
Depends on your goals. 2 x 40 minutes in calories burned is close to that hour and a half. How long, duration and distance, are the orienteering courses? Through what terrain? I wrote a while back of my first impression of the sport nearly 30 years ago, pre-GPS, and I haven't paid attention to it since.

Skewbrow:
The local orienteering clubs offer a choice 2 km (beginners), 3-4 km (intermediate), 5-6-7 km (advanced) courses all according to skill, endurance, speed, whatever. Lately I've been taking only those 3-4 km courses as my speed is what it is (15 + min /km). That is sort of average among the local hobbyists (or somewhat below, if I elect a tougher course). Of course, the athletes do something like 8 min/km, and (depending on the terrain) world class runner do around 6 minutes/km. The local terrain is relatively flat with patches of marshland interspersed with rocky areas. Mostly wooded (this is Finland, after all) of varying density of trees.

I would expect you get more variety in type of terrain in the US (or central Europe, or, for example Norway) than what I'm seeing here. In Finland you get very different terrains, if you go the areas where there are eskers, ridges and other formations dating back to the ice age, but locally it is more monotone (altitude variations about 100 ft or thereabouts).

This year my streak of 13 years of participating in our annual main event came to an end due to my foot injury. In that relay I have done legs between 8 and 12 km with more warying terrain (12 km is like a marathon to me). My teammates are somewhat faster than I am, but they don't
seem to mind too much.

Did you do orienteering while serving in the army or how did you get interested? IIRC it is not a big sport in the US, though it could become so, if suitable terrains are found within, say college towns.

Redball:
I wrote about this somewhere, maybe here: My wife and I did some light hiking and camping in a Michigan recreation area not far from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in the 1980s. It was light enough, but we camped out there at least once in every month of the year. One day, driving down a dirt road, we spotted a man in shorts and a T-shirt darting out of the woods to the side of the road; I think he eventually crossed the road and continued into the woods. There was something beige and indistinct on his T-shirt. We came to the park hq and discovered that there was an orienteering meet. I asked enough questions to understand the concept. We hiked, saw some of the stations with their punches or stamps. I was fascinated, enough to buy a book about it, but not enough to engage in it. My army basic training 20 years before was far too limited to teach overland navigation. And the indistinct beige on the man's shirt? I'm pretty sure he'd collected burrs as he bushwhacked.

Barmymoo:
I haven't managed to run once yet, but I've done so much walking that I think my fitness won't have suffered too much and I can start running again next week. Hopefully I'll have acclimatised to the heat by then!

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