Route to Christmas: Day 15 2014

In today’s Route to Christmas we travel to the other side of the world: Australia! The chosen leg is leg number 47(!) in the M21 course from the Wildfire Sports Australian Ultra Long Championships at Kooyoora organized at August 31st 2014.

I asked for legs for more exotic places – and Neil Barr gave me this one from Australia. Thanks a lot, Neil! There is certainly more GPS-data available from legs in Scandinavia – making the analysis easier, but for most of the followers of Route to Christmas it is a lot of fun to get some route choice challenges from different places & terrains. So if anyone has more of these exotic out-of-Scandinavia legs with some GPS-data/Routegadget-data for analysis, please add a comment or send an e-mail.

In Shep’s attackpoint log about the race, the overall conclusion is “Awesome courses, great fun. Super orienteering weekend” – and from the map it indeed looks great. This is an unknown territory for me, so I can not give you that many tips before choosing your route. I did however take a look at how fast the fastest of the runners runs in different terrain types to give you an indication of the terrain: White forest around 4:30-4:40 min/km. Paths around 4:00 min/km (not too bad speed towards the end of a 20 km race). Light green is often not much slower than white, but it can go down to maybe 5:00 min/km. The stony areas or areas with patched vegetation can cost some more time, but that may partly also be because you then need to use more time for navigation.

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. I’ll first give you Neil Barr’s quick comment: – The 2nd and 3rd places hinged on control 46 to 47. The left option was inferior to running direct and then right through the assembly.

Analysis in short (see all the figures below):

• The blue, direct route seems to be the best (going through the assembly), but going right and taking it from the road does not seem to be bad either.
• Going through the green, stony area from the bend of the road (red line below) seems to be too slow due to the runnability in this area. Keely loses 1:30 between the road and the control. On the other hand, at least 40-50 seconds of this is probably due to navigation mistake; but then again it is better to choose the other options which are easier? It does seem to be very slow there as well.
• The green route from the road seems quite OK – you could even run the road all the way to the small path north of 49. The entrance to the control is not that easy though, so maybe it is not worth it?

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.