WOC Long Qual: Routes of Heat winners and Brief analysis

Jan Kocbach July 16, 2012 Orienteering News Comments Off on WOC Long Qual: Routes of Heat winners and Brief analysis

Looking at the routes and races of the top runners in the qualification may give an indication of what to expect in the long distance final on Thursday. Below routes of the heat winners in the Long Qualification and some selected favourites and/or outsiders are shown.

In addition to the complete routes shown towards the bottom of this article, I have taken a look at some specific legs.

Note that as this is a qualification, runners will run in varying speed in varying parts of the course. Also, some runners take safe route choices – typically avoiding green and risky places in qualification races while others treat it like “the real thing”. Thus it is difficult to make any real conclusions. Also, based on the terrain description, the terrain for the final is expected to be much less of a “run direct” terrain than the qualification – with poorer runnability and more height differences.

10-11, Mens Heat A

One of the few legs which invited (some) to take a long detour was the leg from 10 to 11 in men’s heat A shown below. As you can see Kerschbaumer tried a long left route while Lundanes and Hertner run direct.

– It was fast to run around and did not look very good direct, so it felt like a good route choice, Kerschbaumer said after the race. – But I am very interested to look at the splits to see if it was better to go direct, the Austrian runner continued.

As you can see from the map, Kerschbaumer lost significant time on this leg – even to Hertner who did a mistake on the control. Thus in this terrain type this type of detour seems to be too long.

15-16, Mens Heat A

15-16 was another leg where some runners tried to go around. The longest detour was made by Hertner – and he also lost the most time here.

18-19, Mens Heat A

Another long route around by Hertner – another time time lost. Most of the others seem to run direct here.

Brief conclusion

The brief conclusion from a look at some routes is that in this long qual you should go as direct as possible and use all paths which go approximately in your direction. Break the rule only if there is Green 2 or similar very low runnability. But this was the qualification terrain – the finals will probably be a completely different story ….

Routes of Heat Winners and other selected runners

Below you find the routes of the 6 heat winners along with routes of some other selected runners based on possible favourites on the long distance (it was not easy to find all the ones I wanted in the big stack of maps, so e.g. routes of Nordberg, Jansson, Billstam and others are missing.

Note! Routes are photographs of the routes drawn by the runners (as there was no GPS tracking), and therefore quality is not the very best. Still it is more than good enough to be well readable.

July 15th 2012 – Philippe Adamski

WOC Long Qual: Routes of Heat winners and Brief analysis

Routes of Heat Winners and other selected runners

Results

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