Discussion: Alcohol and O

What is the common opinion on the effects of drinking and orienteering the morning after? In Scandinavia, I often saw top Swedish and Finnish orienteers drink heavily after major races and sometimes even have a beer or two the night before a race and then go out and destroy the competition. Greg Balter wss telling me that 50 grams of vodka sets your training back three weeks. Does anyone have any other ideas on the subject? (And, umm, i am asking this for a friend of mine, yeah.)

my guess is that it's not helping your friend run faster [1] but maybe feeling a bit sluggish prevents him from running too fast and missing the controls. of course in cases of severe "dehydration" it is also more difficult to concentrate.

in any case, csu will be distributing free beer/liquor to all other clubs on saturday night before the relay champs.

Here we go... knocking out competitors with alcohol hmmmmmmm... Make sure you have enough of it because in small dozes it may prove to provide an oposit effect :))))))))))

Correction 150-200 gramms and only two weeks -
tested on many ocasions - Greg

Many years of careful testing have proven that the optimum number of beers before an important race is 2.5

In all seriousness I actually do believe beer is good for you the night before running, in reasonable quantities of course. It does have some good things in it, which are of course offset by the dehydration effect etc of the alcohol..so ideally you should probably drink alcohol free beer..ugh

I can still remember Siggy Gould of the UK passing out in the street at 3am and winning a big race the next morning at 9am...

I probably should have had at least one beer before day two at the US champs.