Route to Christmas: Day 11 2015

Today we visit Finland for a night orienteering leg – and this time we take a look at the women’s class. The chosen race is the Finnish Championships Night organized at September 26th 2015 – and the chosen leg is the 5th leg.

Even with the strong headlamps available today, night orienteering is a lot more challenging, and most allow themselves to run further around at night than in daytime in order to reduce risk

December is time for night orienteering cups in many areas (at least with the mild winters we have these days) – so you might already have the right mindset for choosing a good route. Even with the strong headlamps available today, night orienteering is a lot more challenging, and most allow themselves to run further around at night than in daytime in order to reduce risk. Today’s leg is a typical night leg with possibilities to run far around with high speed – and alternatively trust your orienteering on one of the direct routes. What would you choose?

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). The terrain looks super fast – take a look at some pictures here.

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 (see also results here).

As you can see there is a wide spread in routes. The ones who ran fastest took a mix of direct and around to the right – using first the road and then the small path. Going all the way around to the right is about a minute slower – going all the way around to the left 2 minutes slower.

Here is also a breakdown on why the direct route is too slow: Both the steep downhill and the lightgreen slows you down – and typically more so than at night time. For the men’s it would probably have been closer – with the fastest time being run direct. Or what do you think?

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 – 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!