Route to Christmas: Day 14 2015

Day 14 in Route to Christmas takes us to Denmark – and a long leg with many route choice options. The chosen leg is leg 25 in the M21E course from the Danish Championships Long organized at September 13th 2015. 

Denmark is country number 14 in this year’s Route to Christmas – thanks to Johan Aagaard for the suggestion!

Danish Johan Aagaard introduces the leg as follows: – Even though the terrain is not as exciting as many of the others you have showed, the leg 24-25 i quite interesting. Especially because the runners pick 4-5 very different routechoices.

One can also add to Johan’s introduction that the leg is interesting because the two best runners in the race had very different strategy on this leg – and one of them failed. Can you find the best route on this leg?

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 is typical Danish. Very fast in the white forest (see picture of the forest here), the light green is quite fast, but the darker green should be avoided. Note that the contour interval is 5 meters.

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. First an illustration with all the different route choices. The two fastest runners overall, Bobach (winner) and Nørskov (second) had approximately the same running speed, but go very different on this leg. As you can see Nørskov going left (but not all the way left, rather cutting through the forest) is nearly a minute faster than Bobach going straight. Thus direct is clearly bad – left is clearly fast. More details below.

First let us compare the two similar left routes of Nørskov and Schøning. Nørskov is fastest on the leg, but loses time to Schøning three different places where Schøning cuts through while Nørskov goes around. Thus Schøning’s route is actually faster, and Bobach’s direct route is even some 15-20 seconds slower than left.

Then take a look at Boesen’s route going even further to the left. Here it is clear that Boesen and Nørskov have approximately the same running speed – but cutting through as Nørskov does is approximately half a minute faster.

Then take a look at Djurhuus going right. This route is only 80 meters shorter than Nørskov’s route – that’s simply too much when you look at that slow part both around control 36 and towards the end of the leg.

Finally the comparison between Bobach and Nørskov. Here you can see that the extra uphills is what really costs time at the direct route.

Additional analysis by Johan Aagard:
In addition to your route analysis it looks like we could elaborate a bit more on the difference in routechoice between leg winner (Nørskov) and (Schøning). Maybe Nørskov just wanted to run as much as possible on the road or maybe he were in doubt if the “Cultivated land” signature were Out Of Bounds?

And if we follow this thought trough Nørskov could have been aproximately 19 seconds faster (If have crossed the cultivated land, as Schøning did), and in that case he would have been not 37 seconds, but only 18 seconds from the gold medal (as a first year senior).

The Out of bounds diskussion is still on going in Denmark (Orientering.dk), and there is many different opinions.
If we look at the ISOM 2000/a>

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!