Route to Christmas: Day 1 2011

Todays leg in Route to Christmas takes us to beautiful Austrian terrain – to the JEC 2011 in Arnoldstein, Austria. In the Bulletin the runners were met with the following warning: – You are on the way to the largest rock fallen area in the Alps. So be careful in stony areas.

The chosen leg is the first leg in the M20 course. What would you do on the way to the first control in one of the most important races of the year with this terrain description?

Leg without routes

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.

“Solution”

Then you can take a look at how the runners who have drawn their route choice solved this leg below. Note that only a few of the runners have drawn their routes, but Andreas Boesen going left had the overall third best split on this leg. The winner Marius Thrane Ødum was fastest on this split, but did not draw his route in Routegadget. Florian Schneider has the 6th best time overall on this split with his routechoice to the right. Thus there is not enough data to fully conclude, but it may seem like right and left are quite similar in running time. For a first control, I would thus probably choose the rightmost route to have more security and be able to run more on larger tracks/road.

Community solution

Based on 250 readers of World of O drawing their choice, here is the “community solution”:

Help!

The ‘Route to Christmas’ series at World of O have been very popular the last years – and I’ve therefore decided to continue the series this Christmas as well. If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget from 2011-competitions – or old forgotten ones which are still interesting – please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll include it in Route to Christmas if it looks good. Route to Christmas will not be interesting if YOU don’t contribute.

The Route to Christmas series gets more difficult to fill up every year: Less people use Routegadget and there are less long distance races with good route choice legs. Last year, quite a few GPSSeuranta races were chosen – and the same will be done this year. However, GPSSeuranta is currently mostly used in the Nordic countries, and there is SO much interesting orienteering elsewhere in the world. Please help me & the readers by sending tips about good legs for Route to Christmas 2011!

Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com

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

Omaps.worldofo.com

There will be no analysis about the best routechoice for each leg – you can provide that yourself in the comments or in the Webroute. Not all legs are taken for the interesting routechoice alternatives – some are also taken because the map is interesting – or because it is not straightforward to see what to do on a certain leg. Any comments are welcome – especially if you ran the event chosen for todays leg!

Note that there may be some errors in the Routegadget data (sometimes somebody draws a route for another runner just for fun). Please add a comment below if you spot en error.