World of O News
Today’s Route to Christmas takes us to Ireland to the last race of the 2011 LongO series at Tollymore organized in March this year. Over 80 orienteers enjoyed fair weather and endured tough courses as you can read about here.
To set you in the mood for today’s Route to Christmas, here is the terrain description from the event webpage:
This area nestles on the northern slopes of the Mourne mountains near Newcastle. Tollymore forest is a mixed forest with many paths. It is disected by the Shimna river and provides some steep climbs towards the Drins. The open areas of Lukes mountain and Meelmore offer fast running and some areas of finer rock and contour detail especially amongst the granite workings of Meelmore. The area was considered for this years JK and a new 1:15000 map was commissioned for this purpose. Following the decision to hold the JK classic race at nearby Slieve Croob this will be the first chance for orienteers to use the combined area for a proper ‘classic’.
Today’s leg is leg 6 in the Long course – a tough leg with a lot of climbing. As always it isn’t easy to make a choice without knowing the terrain in detail – especially when weighing green against taking extra climb – but still you’ll have to make a choice…
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 how the runners who have drawn their route choice solved this leg. As you can see, many runners run down and up again to avoid the green area just after the 5th control. It might look like the green is not the place to be in this particular part of Ireland? Only one of the ones drawing – O’Boyle – run up and down again – getting a lot of path running. O’Boyle is also the fastest on the leg – and I would say that this is probably the best choice on this leg…?
“O-Community’s choice”
See below for what the nearly 400 people drawing their choice thought in a density map.
Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com
You find the complete map and Routegadget info in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.
Omaps.worldofo.com
The ‘Route to Christmas’ series at World of O has 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.
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.
