For day 17 we travel to a really cool terrain in Ukraine. This course is actually from a training three days ago (December 14th) by a group around Oleksandr Kratov (Cherkassi Training Camp).
Marshes are different from Scandinavian marshes – most often completely covered by high reed – so when you enter one you need to be really careful with direction because you don’t see much (Oleksandr Kratov)
There is very limited GPS-data available for this leg, but after finding the course by chance on 3DRerun I thought this would still be a good leg for Route to Christmas as long as the leg is accompanied by some thoughts from one of the masters of orienteering on how to solve these types of legs. Please add a note in the comments if this is something to also consider in the future to be able to expand Route to Christmas to more countries, or if you rather want legs with “hard facts” about which route is the fastest (GPS, RouteGadget or similar data).
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. Note that there are only a limited number of runners, and most of them struggled with the technical part of the task in various ways – it is therefore not easy to get too much information out based on this. Kratov himself ran to the left (blue route).
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!