Route to Christmas: Day 10 2011

Monsterleg! 4.5 km long! Today’s Route to Christmas is the longest leg in this years travel through the orienteering world. I choose a Saturday for it as I guess you all have some extra time for Route to Christmas in the weekend. Todays leg is leg number 34(!) in the 25 km long H21 course from the Finnish Champs Ultralong, organized on May 21st 2011.

The race was organized as a mass start with 3 forked loops of around 4 km first – and afterwards one long loop of 13 km. This 34th leg is towards the last part of the race – a decisive leg in the race!

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 (this is a real monsterleg – so it might be good to open it in a new window for drawing). 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. Remember that this is leg number 34 in a long course (you find the complete course here).

Then you can take a look at how the runners who have drawn their route choice solved this leg. Full splits and results are available here. Click here to open to routes in a new window. Note that only a few of the good runners have drawn their routes – but among them is the winner Petteri Muukkonen – who was also the fastest runner on this very long leg. Kiril Nikolov who finished second overall did not draw his route in Routegadget, but he has posted his route on his webpage, and you can see that he has the same route as Muukkonen for large parts of the leg. However, he chose a more direct route on the first third of the leg (and as far as I can read from Google Translate, so did Pasi Ikonen). – We parted and I like the route of Pasi and me better, Nikolov writes on his webpage.

– After about 1.5 km race through the woods, we were again gathered all three together. On the road Muukkonen built up the pace dramatically, and I decided to follow him, Nikolov continues.

– Unfortunately in this fast pace, a stop at the refreshments would cost me a lot, and Muukkonen had a Camelback and I didn’t. I decided to venture out and try to stand up to where I can.

Pasi Ikonen’s route you can find in his training diary – part 4 and part 5 of his map from the race contains the long leg.

Thus based on the routes drawn, you would probably not do too bad by taking one of the northern routes which involves a lot of road running as the three top finishers in the race did. None of the runners drawing their route have chosen the southern alternative which also involves a lot of road running. The southern route is about 15% longer, but gives you nearly only road running. 15% is probably still too much. Have you got any comments to this long leg? Did you participate?

Update: More analysis

Some comments by e-mail from Antti Harju:

Situation in the race before long leg 33-34 (based on splits)

• Nikolov, Muukkonen, Ikonen together
• Fincke, + 1.50
• Anjala, Parjanne, Taanila, Lakanen +2.40-2.50

Situation in the race at control 34: