Route to Christmas: Day 17 2012

Todays leg in Route to Christmas is from a women course in Hungary in some very special terrain. The race in question is Juniper Open which was organized on March 4th – and the terrain is an interesting mix of open terrain and green areas.

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

This leg caught my interest after seeing Eva Jurenikova write about it in her Doma-archive – and afterwards finding it on 3DRerun along with the routes of some other runners for comparison.

This is the type of control which you can see already from the map that it is really tricky – a leg which might loose you the race if not attacked in a good way – and thus a good attackpoint should be one of your main criteria for choosing your route. Generally you should

• Make the orienteering as easy as possible up to as close as possible to the control – either by using the paths/tracks or by using easy-to-distinguish features.
• Make sure the orienteering from your last safe attackpoint is not too tricky

Two alternatives are included in the route choices shown – Eva Jurenikova’s which includes very little running on path, and the route of Labasove and Knapova which follows the path further. A third option would be to follow the path even further, and taking the control from behind. Jurenikova took the most risky option – leaving the path early. Here is what Jurenikova wrote about the leg:

– It went OK until control number 8 – I understood the map well. Then I choose the wrong route choice to number 9 – and when I got closer to the control I started to get uncertain about exactly where I was. Even with this uncertainty, I went into the green. I did not understand it, so I decided to get out to the road. There it took too much time to relocate. Mistake of 5 minutes. Stupid to go into the green without 100% control – I did it even if I reminded myself about this several times ahead of the race.

From Jurenikova’s description and also from the comparisons above, you see that quite some time is lost already due to the uncertainty. This is one of the main reasons for time loss among top elite orienteers – and something which you can often reduce by planning better ahead, being better at simplification, and doing less risky route choices. For Jurenikova, the time due to uncertainty was just the start in this particular case – a lot more time was lost afterwards.

Going back to the leg, you see that Knapova also looses a lot of time – she also looses control before the control, and looses nearly as much time as Jurenikova. On the other hand, taking the control from behind is tricky for the last part into the control from the path / last attackpoint. Still I think this would be the best option for this particular leg. What do you think?

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.