Discussion: Race distance terminology

I was just on the WOC web site and noticed that in the open public events Sweden is using:
sprint, short, classic. I suspect this is in part because Sweden has a "long champs".

In the elite WOC races they use short, middle, long (as per IOF).

If North American races start to add IOF short and middle races what terminology or nomenclature should be used?

My personal preference is that we should be using terms that will result in the least confusion. I like sprint, short, and long for winning times of about 15, 30, and 90 respectively and keep classic for the 60-75 range.

I don't really like the term middle since it is changing the name of an already existing distance (ie., short) but I'll warm-up to the term middle if we actually got to race more of them.

Nevertheless, it would be good for USOF and COF to agree on terms as our sport is already full of confusing terms already.

I personally like Classic for the 90m one. It sounds, well, classy. It also has a long tradition at IOF. Sprint and Short for 15 and 30 sounds great. Middle doesn't really fit anything. Its an ill-defined quantity that implies being right in the center (mean, or perhaps median) of the range. Ideally we should use the time itself, but thats lame. Who wants to say "yeah, JJ beat me in the 15-minute." ? Besides people would abbreviate it 15m and that would be even more confusing - especially at the top of the clue sheet. I dunno what to do about the 60-70m category. Perhaps just "Blue" or maybe "Blue7" or "Bleu"

I think we already have acceptable terminology:
Sprint - 12-15 mins (IOF Short)
Short - 25-30 mins (IOF Middle)
Classic - 60-70 mins
Long >90mins (IOF Long)

The confusion is with so called "classic" that is known only on North American soil. I don't know any other nation that uses "classic" distances for the championships. They used only as qualification races elsewhere.

> Who wants to say "yeah, JJ beat me in the 15-minute." ?

Nobody would want to admit to that.

This is North America. As far as I know, everything is 'classic', isn't it? ;-)
Seriously though, I wouldn't care what we called the different events if only we could run sprints, short (middle) and true long races more often.

I had been under the impression that US Classic tended to be shorter than IOF Long, but that US Long tended to be longer than IOF Long. Sergey has indicated otherwise. Does our current long format approximate IOF Chamionship distance?

As our top elites are ~20% slower than world elite so winning time of 2 hours is close to 90-100 mins recommended for Long course by IOF (see page 16 of IOF Competition rules).

My humble opinion is that focus of the team and USOF on qualification formats is very wrong. If the one trains for WOC finals so should pass qualification races easily. As far as I know only 2 athletes in NA are training enough to qualify for WOC finals: Mike Waddington and Brian May. Couple more athletes are approaching them. The rest (including myself) are way way behind.

Before athletes start putting 10-15 hour quality training weeks and hold this volume for years to come to some decent shape - nothing would change with NA elite level. Sad…