Route to Christmas: Day 20 2012

Todays leg in Route to Christmas is from Germany – from the WMOC organized in July 2012. The chosen leg is leg numer 11 in the M40A course – and thus we are not looking at current elite orienteers this time.

Thanks a lot to route planner Rolf Breckle for the tip. Some comments from Breckle about the course to set the leg in perspective:

• It was an honour for me when I was asked to be the course setter of the WMOC long final this year. I had the chance to set courses for all the runners I know out there in the world. Many gave me a good feed-back.
• The terrain for the WMOC final in the longer courses had some terrain changes on the way, so runners had to adopt every couple controls: A danish opening with green plantation forest and rides, then a very fast open part followed by a short tricky rocky area, some diffuse controls in flat green area, some fun rocky controls and then a route choice going down into this rocky steep slope.
• I wanted to use this slope for a route choice in the longest courses M35A, M40A and M45A to give them yet another change in terrain and a real challenge.

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 solved this leg below. For some runners we have GPS-data (from 3DRerun) – for others only routes drawn in RouteGadget are available. Combining the two sources, there is enough information to understand the leg quite well.

Comments

Unfortunately there is no GPS-track available for the two top runners in this race – Thomas Jensen and Yuri Omelchenko. They have drawn their route in RouteGadget though, and Jensen has a significantly better time running up (left as seen from control 10 towards 11) than Omelchenko who goes too far right.

All the runners for which there is GPS-data available do significant mistakes into the control – between 1 and 3 minutes. The GPS is therefore shown to an area just before the control (without the mistake) – and to this point Joaquim Sousa runs 5:56 – half a minute faster than Jensen’s official split for the leg. Shved who runs direct looses time – more time than he seems to loose up the hill.

Thus the conclusion based on the data available is that up seems to be faster – the last part into the control is quite risky, though, if you try to “cut corners” and skipping a good, last attackpoint like Sousa and Renner do.

Here are the comments of Breckle about the leg:

• Here in the middle of the race you had to decide if you take some extra climb over the top of the hill or try to save some energy. If you looked carefully the leg is at least 45m uphill. And in the end of the courses there was another tough climb waiting.
• In the testing I was sure the choices around and over the top were about the same. But I was impressed by the times possible over that steep hill. Important was a good entry to the control.
• On the route contouring the hill it was important to use the tracks and not getting stuck in the rocky and steep slope or to do too much extra climbing.

– Dear Route to christmas-fans, please visit the Routegadged page of the WMOC for more interesting choices i.e. in the M50A and W35A or the above mentioned M35A or M45A, Breckle finishes his comments to the route.

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.