Frequently asked questions

OCR guiden is your comprehensive guide to obstacle course racing (OCR) in Sweden. We gather information about all Swedish OCR races in one place to make it easy to find, compare and plan your participation in various races.

OCRguiden aims to lower the barriers to the sport by helping both beginners and experienced practitioners find the right competitions, clubs and competition opportunities. Our ambition is to support more people to take the next step, from curious participant to active competitor in OCR.

OCR stands for Obstacle Course Racing, which in Swedish is called hinderbanelöpning. It is a sport where participants run along a course while overcoming a variety of physical obstacles along the way. These obstacles can include climbing walls, crawling under barriers, carrying heavy objects, and crossing water or mud sections, testing both endurance and strength.

An OCR race often has between 20 and 40 obstacles. For example, it can be walls to climb over, ropes and nets to get through, heavy things to carry, water obstacles or moments where you crawl.

The sport trains the whole body and requires both fitness and strength. You also need balance, agility and focus to complete the obstacles.

How the course looks depends on who organises the race. Some races have more rigging and climbing, while others focus more on running or heavy carrying moments. The races can be short and fast or long and demanding, and go through forest, city or mountains.

Sanctioned OCR races mean that the race meets Swedish Athletics' (SFIF) established rules and quality requirements and is conducted according to official guidelines. Read more about this via the link below.

Each competitor in a sanctioned obstacle course race starts with three wristbands.

If you fail an obstacle, one wristband is removed by an official.

For each removed wristband, the competitor must do a penalty lap after the course's last obstacle.

The penalty lap can be a short running lap, carrying weight or completing an extra obstacle, and should be at least as time- and energy-consuming as the hardest obstacle on the course.

If you lose all 3 bands you get the result DNC (Did Not Complete) and thus no ranking points.

Ranking points in obstacle course racing show how well you perform compared to others.

When you compete in a sanctioned OCR race, your time together with your previous ranking is calculated into a performance score. All participants' performance scores are compared, and the average becomes the race's average performance.

* If you have performed better than the average you get a lower ranking score, which is good.

* If you have performed worse than the average the score becomes higher.

Each sanctioned OCR race gives points, and your total ranking score is calculated as the average of your three best results/races, which means that if you have three results the ranking system completely ignores your worst scores.

For the ranking to be current, only results from the last 14 months are counted.

The better you perform, the lower your ranking score becomes and the higher your placement in the ranking.