Route to Christmas: Day 24 2010

What would be more fitting than to present a leg from The Course of the Year 2010 – Jukola – at the last day of Route to Christmas 2010? And as a big bonus, you get the winner interview from The Course of the Year 2010 – an interview with the course setter Ari Kattainen.

Interview: Course setter Ari Kattainen – Course of the Year 2010

Q: When did you start planning the courses for Jukola 2010 – and how many hours do you think you spent on it?

Some course examples were made in May 2004 for the Management Team of Jukola when we first time presented our plans to organize Jukola in Kytäjä. In 2004 we submitted an application to organize, Jukola 2009 but it wasn’t successful. We improved the application in 2005 for Jukola 2010, and then we got the rights to do it. Some of the controls and splits appears to be same as in the final courses. Serious planning started in 2008.

For each control, ask yourself if it is really needed.

My work in Kytäjä-Jukola included a lot of other duties in addition to course planning, and I used more than 2000 hours for the project. It sounds like a lot, but when split over seven years it is less than one hour per day.
For a participant, Jukola might be just one out of thirty events per year, but for the organizer it could be 10% of a persons life. Competition Manager Risto Pirinen estimated that the total amount of work for Jukola 2010 was 140 000 hours.

Q: What is the best course you have planned?
I think it is the 7th leg of the Kytäjä-Jukola relay. But we have to remember that this is team work. We had five persons in the core course settlng team. Tapani Partanen and Janne Åberg were in charge of the Venla-relay. Myself and Ossi Autio were planning Jukola courses. We can also count course supervisor Juha Liukkonen as full member of the team. Juha maybe had the best touch for orienteering thinking of top runners.

Q: What is your work flow as a course setter? How do you start?
Work includes a lot of background like:
– selecting map area and competition center
– negotiating land usage permission and nature conservation needs
– setting up target times and styles for the courses

Course planning itself starts with fixed distance sample courses like 7km, 10km, 13km. It gives an idea which areas on the map can be reached.

In big events like Jukola also VIP-control, TV-controls and location drink stations need to be taken into account. Course planning itself starts with fixed distance sample courses like 7km, 10km, 13km. It gives an idea which areas on the map can be reached. Then it continues with selection of K-point location and area for the first controls.

Q: What is your best tip for setting a good course?
For each control, ask yourself if it is really needed.

Q: What was the best course you run in 2010 – and why?
Finnish Championship relay in Kauhajoki. The course required clear tempo changes and the controls were difficult.

Q: What is the worst course you run in 2010?
It takes so much volunteers time to organize orienteering competition that in respect to their work I don’t want name any. But certainly something can be always improved.

Q: What is your biggest success as a runner?
World Champion bronze medal in relay in Sweden 1989 and 6th place in Nordic Championship long distance in 1990 in Denmark.

Q: Thank you to Ari Kattainen for the interview – and congratulations for the great courses at Jukola 2010.

Todays leg number 1

As this is the last day in Route to Christmas 2010 (except for some bonus “leftover” legs the next days), I have included several legs in this edition. The problem with routechoice analysis for a relay is of course that the leg times may be skewed due to people running together – but I still try to do some analysis. We start off with the last leg in the Jukola relay – this is a day leg. The leg is as usually first provided without routes – you may take a look at it and think about how you would attack this leg (if the image is too small, you may click on it to get it larger):

Webroute

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Think through how you would attack this leg, and draw the route you would have made. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

Then you can take a look at the fastest routes. As you can see Kalevan Rasti is fastest with a direct/northern routechoice. However, looking at the isochrone diagram below, you can see that there is some potential for doing the leg faster by comparing the routes of Kalevan Rasti and TuMe. Looking even further down, the calculated optimal route for the leg is shown – and here you can see that the optimally calculated route is yet another one. Finally the color-route is shown – which I think gives a very good overview of what happened on the leg.

Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com

You find the complete map and Routegadget info in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Todays leg number 2

The second leg is from the 3rd leg (the long night) of the Jukola relay. The leg is as usually first provided without routes – you may take a look at it and think about how you would attack this leg. There is no analysis provided for legs number 2 to 4 in this edition of Route to Christmas – but there should be enough information in the illustrations for you to do the analysis yourself. And why not add the analysis in the comment as well when you are at it…?

Webroute

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Think through how you would attack this leg, and draw the route you would have made. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

Then you can take a look at the GPS data from this leg

Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com

You find the complete map and Routegadget info in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Todays leg number 3

The third leg is again from the last leg of the Jukola relay. The leg is as usually first provided without routes – you may take a look at it and think about how you would attack this leg (if the image is too small, you may click on it to get it larger):

Webroute

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Think through how you would attack this leg, and draw the route you would have made. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

Then you can take a look at the GPS data from this leg:

Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com

You find the complete map and Routegadget info in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Todays leg number 4

Finally we have a leg from the first leg of the Venla relay. First the leg without routes:

Webroute

Next you can draw your own route using the ‘Webroute’ below. Think through how you would attack this leg, and draw the route you would have made. Some comments about why you would choose a certain route are always nice for the other readers.

Then you can take a look at the GPS data from this leg:

Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com

You find the complete map and Routegadget info in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Tour de Ski coming up!

World of O’s sister-site for cross country skiing, World of XC is organizing WhoWins for Tour de Ski. Set up your predictions for the Top 5 in then mens and womens category for each Tour de Ski race, and see how you compare with the others!