World of O News
Today we visit Italy and the legendary Venice orienteering meeting – MOV – in Route to Christmas. To disturb less tourists (and to scare the few who are roaming the streets at night more?), this year’s edition was held as a night orienteering race. The date: November 14th.
Venice is the same at night as in the day: It is like running in a maze – luckily you have got a map to guide you. Lots of small alleys, crossing channels and seeing historic buildings all over. An experience every orienteer should try at least once! In today’s leg in Route to Christmas we look at the 4th leg in the H21E course. As always in Venice, straight is not an option. What would you choose? A lot of small corners in narrow alleys or rather finding some broader alleys where you can really speed up?
Help me! Have you got good ideas for Route to Christmas? I’d really like to get as many countries as possible into Route to Christmas – but I’m struggling to find good legs outside the Scandinavian countries. Any help is highly appreciated – both by me and by World of O’s readers. Send me a quick e-mail at jan@kocbach.net with your ideas!
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 the lengths of some possible routes drawn below. In addition there are GPS-tracks available of two runners – Alessio Tenani and Gernot Kerschbaumer. From the GPS-tracks it looks like both decided to take the green B-route to the left – which is also the shortest route. However it is not easy to interpret the GPS-tracks accurately in a city like Venice.
However, the measured lengths below tell us most of the story. The left route is 60 meters shorter than the red one (A), and has even less 90 degree corners – thus it is definitely the fastest. Probably B is faster by around 15 seconds? Going all the way around to C is another 20 meters longer – but you get to run some nice, broad, straight alleys. I would put C and A approximately equal – and with C you’d be ready for further challenges as you have more chances to relax and read the map later in the course.
The course setter has tried to trick the runners to go right by forcing you to go back a bit before starting in the direction of the control. The control could maybe have been put another 10-15 meters along the line towards the next corner. Then still B would have been 30 meters shorter – and maybe 7-8 seconds faster – but most had chosen the other options. Or what do you think?
But as always in Venice: Navigating through all the narrow alleys and THEN taking your route choice under high pressure – that’s what makes Venice really challenging. And instead of a regular sprint you’ll have to endure the pressure for more than half an hour (earlier it was even longer, but it looks like it has been cut down to 30 minutes now).
[Last chance: VOTE for Course of the Year 2015 before December 7th – battle for prizes worth more then 2.500 Euro!]Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.
Navigation is more tricky than choicing your route – but still you need to be careful on each leg
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 – giving the readers the opportunity to do one Route Choice Challenge each day from December 1st until December 24th. If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget, GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2015-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!
