Discussion: International competition classes

I'm looking into some possible overseas O ventures and I noticed the large number of "open" classes. For women there's W21E, W21A, maybe a W21B, and sometimes a W21AK. I understand that the difficulty varies, but are there any sort of guidelines or etiquette about which one to run? How do I know where to start? Is it like, say, cycling, where once you do well in one category, you are supposed to move up? Does anyone care which class you enter? I'm not so worried about being accused of sandbagging as I am of being totally smoked by the whole field.

Typically W21E is for ranked elite runners only. Being from Norht America they usually let you in, but to be honest, other Europeans don't necessarily appreciate as they feel like you are "stealing" a spot in that competition. It's a very strong field and you will likely be smoked (no offense, we all do ;-) ). W21AK is a lot of fun as the courses are a bit shorter, but I would say the caliber and technical level might be a tad lower than W21A. To give you an idea, I say that the leading women in NA right now (excluding Sandy) could do quite well in W21A on a good day. The rest of the NA field could do well in W21B but would probably be at the end of the pack in W21A. It is a self-seed which is nice, and nobody cares too much about where you seed yourself (other than in W21E) but picking the right category might make your trip a whole lot more interesting! I ran W21A in Japan in the spectator races (not W21E), and even though the field was not nearly what you could expect in Europe, I couldn't afford too big of a mistake! Hope that helps!

I ran H16 (or was it 18?) B at O-ringen many years ago... I think I was 5th of 200 on my best day, about 40th on my worst. But the same pace would have put me near the back of AL (A).

A lot of it depends on what you want to do. If you'd like a chance to be above the mid-pack, you should probably do B. However E (or World Cup) is pretty cool because the in-the-race spectating of the truly fast people going by is rather amazing...

I ran in a French 5-day last year in the F-21 Elite catagory and found that to be appropriate (I had pretty mixed results there but was never first nor last and often in the later middle) and D(female) 21-Long at O'Ringen (I ranged from 14th-43rd or so out of about 55 if I remember correctly).

O'Ringen has superelite which is by invitation, elite which might be by Swedish ranking (I'm not sure), long, regular, and several other catagories. The long wasn't really all that long and was a good catagory for me. A few years back I ran D20 (there was also D20E and D20L and D20short I think) and found that I did quite well in that catagory (which at the time was a nice confidence boost).