World of O News
Todays leg in Route to Christmas is leg 11 in the M21E course from a race in France – NationalSE. Thanks a lot to Mathieu Kern-Gillard for the tip and for course setter Franck Dechavanne for the analysis.
This is how the course setter describes this leg: – Indeed, 10-11 is a kind of special leg. With this big hill under the red line it offers many different route choices, and I was finally surprised by the result of the orienteers on it.
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). To get an impression of the terrain, here is a pre-made video about the race and some terrain footage.
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. Here is the course setters analysis:
When I set this leg, I was definitely thinking that the best choice would be on the right side, with just a little a doubt about whether to stay quite close to the red line or to to quite far around on the right (Maxime Rauturier M. R. route choice). The left route choice is longer (1950m against 1450-1700m), you’ve a little more uphill, and something that the runners can’t guess, is that the path which goes up to the top of the hill is quite stony and hard to run.
So, obviously no good reason to say that the left route choice is faster; but the gap made by François Gonon is really important at this level (all the other runners are quite close in 20-25 seconds). Even if the level isn’t as homogenous in France as in the Nordic countries, and sometimes the best time isn’t the best route choice (due to speed and technical differences), here it seems that despite small hesitations from the “right-runners” or top shape from François, you can’t explain all the time gap this way.
The only explanation I got (which seems to be checked by the GPS replay) is that the runnability was quite the same for the uphill on all the routechoices, but the left choice is the only one to offer a very good running speed on the last part of the leg. But, I also have regret that on the last part of this choice Olivier Blanc-Tranchand didn’t take the best option, the red route on the last illustation below (shorter, less uphill, and better runnability), but even with this option I don’t think that would have been enough to earn more than 1 minute to have the best time on this leg.
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.
