Route to Christmas: Day 17 2011

In today’s Route to Christmas we are off to the British Championships long distance organized close to Sheffield in the middle of May this year. Thanks to Dave Schorah for the tip.

Course setters on this British Championships long distance were Oli and Jenny Johnson – both elite runners in the British Team.

– The challenge of three – for most competitors – very different terrain types and the physical challenge of some typical Yorkshire forest, alongside Oli and Jenny’s well planned courses made for some tired legs, the controller comments the race.

Here are some of the course setters comments:
– Using Grenoside, Wheata and Wharncliffe Woods together made it possible to plan really varied courses with some great route choice legs and tricky control picks. The goal was to design Classic races which would be won by the best orienteer (regardless of whether or not the area ‘suited them’) and to provide a challenge on every leg. We hope we came close to achieving this and the best compliment we could be given was the excellent times set by the winners on all courses. Well done to them all.

Under 6 min/km for 14.5 km

– We are, of course, both impressed and disappointed that W21E and particularly M21E were faster than expected, having lengthened these courses during the planning stages. Wharncliffe is an area with a fearsome reputation and it is a tribute to Doug Tullie that he managed to dip under 6min/km for his 14.5km course. On W21E mistakes in the last 3rd of the course saw 3 different leaders over the last 4 controls with Claire Ward missing, Rachael Elder tiring and Tessa Hill storming through to victory with a run-in split of 1.01.

The chosen leg is leg number 21 in the Men 21 Elite course. 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). Note that the leg is run from right to left.

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 there are three main alternatives: Direct with few paths/roads or using the roads to go either left or right. As you can see, Matthey Crame runs the fastest time on the direct route – but Oleg Chepelin is only 20 seconds slower by taking a long detour to the left, running mostly on roads and saving significantly on height. Douglas Tullie – the fastest overall – looses 20 seconds to Chepelin on the firect route. Based on the running times, I would say going left is risk free and fast – not a bad choice towards the end of a long course!

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.