Routechoice with speed: NM Night
This weekend, I used the Norwegian Champs Night Orienteering to test some methods to analyze orienteering races better using a GPS unit. What I wanted was to get easy information about (1) how fast I am in certain terrain types, in minutes per kilometer to improve my route choices – and (2) to compare my speed at the start of a race compared to the end of a race, to see if I can keep my pace up.
Routegadget on speed
I have until now used routegadget to upload my GPS tracks from my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS watch. That works perfectly, but does not give the information I describe above. There might be other tools which can do exactly what I want, but I have not found any yet. If there is, please send me an email about it – it would save me more work;) So I just made a small script which takes the Routegadget data, plots the track at the map in a jpg-file, and adds a red point every minute so that speed is seen by how close the red points are. In addition, I added the speed for the last minute in minutes per kilometer alongside the red point. It doesn’t look pretty, but it is just the first step – I’ll get it looking better later on if I need, I guess.
Update: I just got an e-mail from Jean Phillipe Stefanini telling me that Sporttracks can do what I want directly. However, it turns out that this does not cover my needs as you need to use mouseover to see the speed along the routechoice. What I wanted is a way to publish maps with speed info directly visible (e.g. on the internet). Also I think it is easier to grasp where time is lost when speed info is written directly on the map and you don’t have to use a mouseover. In addition, in my opinion map calibration is more difficult with Sporttracks than with Routegadget. But thanks a lot for comments Jean Phillipe. Other comments from people with other experinces are also very welcome!
3.3 x Sindre Saksæther – number 12 at NM Night Orienteering 2007 – at the last control.
All of the course
Above you see one part of the course – below you see another part. Alternatively you can go here to see all of the map at once (big file). For the record – the results from the Norwegian Champs Night can be found here – I finished 29th after a run without any big mistakes.
Some examples of analysis,
- Below: Out of control 12, you can see by counting the red points each minute in different terrain types that that I loose approximately 2 minutes by going through the green to the road instead of taking west through the white and following the path.
- Above: Out of control 9 runnability was very bad where I choose to run, so running east around the path would have been faster. Probably also other places.
- Below: I did not loose my pace in the end;)
Just in time for todays Norwegian Champs Long Distance, statistics for Norwegian Champs have been updated with this years sprint and ultralong distance championships results. In addition, several older results have been included (thanks to 