Route to Christmas: Day 8 2014

In today’s edition of Route to Christmas the challenge we have got this year’s first sprint leg – a leg from the Women 21 course in Vårsprinten in Halden, Norway in April this year. The chosen leg is the 7th leg in a course prepared by former sprint World Champion Emil Wingstedt.

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). This type of leg – a long leg in a flat but quite complex area – is mostly about figuring out fast which variant is the shortest. In addition you need to take into account sharp corners which take extra time – but basically anybody should be able to learn seeing the shortest (and therefore also fastest) variant with some training. Can you spot the shortest one here – without using too much time?

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.

This particular race was analyzed using SPAS (see the leg in SPAS here) – a tool for structured analysis of sprint races in orienteering. Below you see the length of each of the alternatives, and you can see that alternatives A and E (left) are the shortest variants. Going to the right (C / B) is at least 50 meters longer, and will lose you significant amount of time.

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.

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 2014-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.