MSC number crunching on NZ outdoors recreation

does it make you a tramper if you cant run all the way and have to alternate between running and walking and have a pack on like a lot of people doing the deception river training for the coast to coast?

Ian: "Lots of material / courses run by MSC and others on river crossing / hypothermia / avalanche awareness, is that effort and focus misplaced, or are the lower fatalities from those causes a result of good work on those areas?" Or does it indicate that this effort is actually working?

@Ian_H: "The woman who drowned in the Mingha River (IIRC) a while back was a trail runner (doing Coast to Coast training), was she not?" Was that this one? http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/75633767/Deception-Valley-river-victim-named-as-Christchurch-doctor-Isabel-Rivett She was widely reported as a tramper in early reports, but it became clearer later that it was apparently a trail running thing. Page 178 states that fatality data was obtained from the Coronial Information System and the NZ Coronial Services Unit. Then, each case was isolated and reviewed by MSC staff to determine the criteria it met. Based on that I'm surprised this case wasn't identified and classified as a trail running death, but maybe it was just missed in the mess of data. From page 177 it reads as if they had to do lots of stuff to create their datasets for trail running and mountain biking, and I think maybe some of the insights being stated should be treated with caution.

@izogi - yes this is the incident I was thinking of. Probably should have appeared in the trail running category, but as others have said, there's a continuum / big blurred area between day trip tramping and day trip trail running. Agreed, some caution is needed in interpreting the data, but the main conclusions I'd take from this likely hold: Falling is the biggest danger that's likely to get you killed, whether tramping, hunting or mountaineering. Mountaineering is most likely to get you killed out there. Trail runners are doing themselves a lot of leg injuries that are resulting in ACC claims / treatment, but are bothering search and rescue and the coroners at quite a lower level than any of the other activities, so the worries we trampers have as to there fast and light approach are pretty much unfounded. Busting an ankle say on the Hollyford face or Tararua tops, resulting in not being able to keep activity rate high enough to keep warm, not being able to make it out > hypothermia due to lack of warm or overnight gear > search and rescue, coroner involved doesn't seem to be happening too much.

On page 5 it states that fatalities are for the date range 1/7/2007 to 31/12/2014. Maybe the trail running incident was outside the date range?

i've seen the no's of trail runners explode in recent years.. more people doing an activity then statistically there will be more incidents but when they are on tramping tracks they may not be recorded in the stats, whoever classifies the accidents, may not be scruitinising the details that well. on a tramping track, therefore its a tramper.

@iangeorge. Yes, maybe. That might explain it. Hi @Ian_H. I agree with you on the falling and mountaineering. This is an excellent compilation for studying and comparing injuries and rescues that have happened, keeping in mind it's only reporting on reported incidents. I still don't think the trail running conclusions are clear-cut. It might be correct to say they're not high risk, but I'm not convinced the data being presented here is enough to draw conclusions. In particular, the participation count data is a critical part of the MSC's insights when comparing things like SAR callouts and injuries to participation. It's one half of figuring out the percentage of callouts prior to comparing two activities, and I don't think their methodology for determining the participation is very robust at all. I'm not meaning to suggest there's a plausible way to make it robust right now... just that we need to be really really careful when considering any of these numbers that are derived from the participation counts, because that seems to be the data we're stuck with. Firstly, MSC is counting number of participants. It's not counting time spent doing the activity, or even frequency of engaging in an activity. Counting discrete participants is fine for an organisation like Sport NZ or Stats NZ, who seem mostly interested in the numbers of people doing anything at all, and seeing if that's changing from year to year. But to me it doesn't seem like a useful thing to compare against the number of incidents. It more that there's not really anything else available, but that doesn't necessarily make it reasonable. Someone who spends several days every week in the outdoors, exposed to risk, is given the same weighting in the participation count as a person who attempts a single run or walk in the entire year, with virtually no time exposed to risk. The first category of person could be doing things *much* more safely yet have an incident merely due to the length of time they spend doing it, whereas the second category of person could be acting very hazardously. Maybe, though, only one in ten of them has an incident after they've spent the same combined amount of time doing their activity as the first person. Yet, because of the skewed comparison with the participation count, it makes it appear as if the first person category has ten times as much of the problem with safety and risk as the second person category... when the opposite may be true. Also, tramping is defined as walking with the intent to be more than an hour from the road, whereas trail running is defined as any running on a tramping track. SAR reports will be easier to parse into tramping versus trail running, because they're likely to be well documented, but the same's not really true for counting participants in activities who tend to be invisible unless something negative happens to them that gets reported somehow. The tramping definition roughly matches what was in the surveys that were used, but to get the count for trail running, MSC took the results of the Active NZ survey... which doesn't specifically ask about trail running, and imposed some rules on the data to filter out stuff that didn't look like trail running. From page 177 'This eliminated claims which mentioned words such as “road” and selected claims which mentioned words such as “bush”.' Then it was all mashed together with data from the International Visitors Survey, which asks different questions and so had to be modified again, with similar issues. They did the same thing for counting trail running injury data from the ACC records. The methodology might have worked, but the report's unclear about exactly what it's doing, and that's part of the problem for me in taking this stuff at face value. For all we can tell from the report, it might result in an incorrectly high participation count if it counts anyone who said they went for a run in the park behind their house, or an incorrectly low participation count if it missed real trail runners on the back-country estate where MSC is most interested in counting. It's impossible to know without more info, and it mightn't be possible to even look at the input data and know what rules to apply. What concerns me here is that there's not a reliable guarantee that the participation data accurately represents the counts for each activity which MSC wants to count, especially with trail running. Even if it does, it doesn't really tell us how much time people are spending exposed to the risks. Only that they've spent any time at all exposed to the risks during the year. That doesn't seem very meaningful to me when trying to compare the riskiness of different activities. Maybe trail runners are really safe with what they do, but I don't think this report provides enough evidence to say that with certainty.

Trail running as a pre-race training event used to be and probably still is forbidden on the coast-to-coast mountain running section (Deception - Mingha). These folks pass themselves off as trampers.