World of O News
Czech Republic’s sandstone paradise is the target for today’s leg in Route to Christmas. The chosen leg is the 15th leg in the men’s course at the last stage of Nice Holidays 2016, organized at August 21st 2016.
“Nice Holidays” is a very nice annual event in the beautiful Czech sandstones. The event is usually sold out just a few hours after the registration opens due to restriction on number of competitors. Today’s leg is not the most interesting one from a technical orienteering standpoint – there are other legs on the course which are more interesting in that respect (see at the bottom of the page for a nice example) – but it is a nice routechoice leg because you need to make a choice based on a combination of map and terrain knowledge. How to you reason here?
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 how the runners have solved this leg below. As you can see, it is clearly NOT too far to go around to the left, which you might have thought? The reason is twofold; (1) the downhill is very steep, making it just as slow to go downhill as to run flat and (2) when you come down, there is actually 50 meters to climb to get up to the control – compared to around 10 meters climb on the rightmost route. 40 meters extra climb is a lot! Did you spot that 40 meters extra climb when looking at the map, or were you fooled like me and chose the leftmost route?
As we promised, here is one of the more interesting parts of the course.
And then also the very tricky labyrinth leg to control 14:
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 2016-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!
