Route to Christmas: Day 9 2013

Todays leg in Route to Christmas is from an interesting course in a very tricky terrain – the Finnish WOC selection races. Many runners had big, big problems solving the orienteering challenges they got served from the course setter – you can see a collection of many, many of the mistakes and timelosses here.

The chosen leg is leg number 13 in the M21E 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):

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 have solved this leg below. As you can see, even in this tricky terrain, going direct seems to be one of the best solutions (Gueorgiou wins the leg clearly with his direct approach). Probable reason: There are not enough obstacles along the direct line to make it necessary to run around – also the attackpoint is not necessarily easier from the big track to the left. Note however that there is also a very good route run around to the left – and this route choice requires less orienteering during significant parts of the leg – this rest-phase can be valuable in this kind of challenging terrain. On the other hand, several runners who tried to take the left route choice ended up doing mistakes on the leg here as well – probably it was not as easy as it looks from the map….

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (will be updated when some have drawn their suggestions).

Comments

PS! Sorry for delay in publishing today – Internet still down at home due to a storm at the end of last week. Therefore also the illustration of the best routes is not top notch – I’ll try to get it updated tonight!

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 2013-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.