Route to Christmas: Day 2 2012

The second day of Route to Christmas 2012 takes us to Norway and the Norwegian Championships Long. The race was organized on September 13th close to Oslo. Todays leg is leg number 13 in the H21 course.

The leg in question was in the second half of the course – a long leg in very hilly terrain. Your challenge as an orienteer is to answer the classical “over or around”-question twice – what would you do? 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):

Location

You find other maps from the area in omaps.worldofo.com here. See also latest additions in 3DRerun from this area in order to learn more about this terrain type.

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 below.

Comments

The leg can be divided into two distinct parts. The first half of the leg it seems very clear from the GPS-data that direct is no-go – all runners going direct loose time. On the second half of the leg the picture is not that clear – but still direct seems somewhat faster than going around.

Omdal hits several cliffs, and looses 10-15 second going up and 25 seconds going down

This leg proved to be quite decisive in the race as this was were Hans Gunnar Omdal lost the victory to Carl Waaler Kaas. Omdal’s 42 second lead at control 12 was turned into a lead nearly as big for Waaler Kaas at control 13 – just about the same as the winning margin of Waaler Kaas in the end.

Omdal’s biggest mistake was to choose the direct route in the first part of the leg – as you can see from the third illustration above, Omdal lost around 40 seconds on this part of the leg – mostly due to the tough climb. On the second part of the leg Omdal chooses approximately the same route as Waaler Kaas, but has a bad micro-routechoices. Omdal hits several cliffs, and looses 10-15 second going up and 25 seconds going down (not reading the position of the cliffs accurately enough?).

Note that the 12th control is a water control – some runners used some extra time here to find their routechoice (which you can observe on the GPS-tracking).

Additional information

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

Route to Christmas series

The ‘Route to Christmas’ series at World of O has been very popular the last years – and I have therefore decided to continue the series this Christmas as well. If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget, GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2012-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.

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.