World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a leg from Poland – from the Polish Club Championships 2016.
The competition is chosen based on a tip by Wojciech Dwojak; however Dwojak suggested leg 14-15, whereas leg 11-12 is suggested for route to christmas. Leg 14-15 is also shown at the boottom of the article,though.
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, the three fastest routes are up onto the road. The reason for going around to the left being faster is mainly the runnability around streams/marshes which seems to be quite poor in this kind of terrain. Not all runners accounted for this in their choice of route. You can see this based on this comparison:
The alternative leg suggested for route to Christmas was the leg from control 14 to 15. This seems to be quite an interesting leg with several route choice alternatives. However, the runners taking the three main routechoice options are nearly equal in time, and thus it is tricky to say which of them is fastest.
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!
Thank you for publishing interesting route-choice legs. For today’s (Dec 21) leg I selected to go right similar to Olejnik, which seems to be a incorrect choice from the leg-times you present. However, if you look also look at the total times, Olejnik actually lose less time (in percentage) on this leg to the two fastest runners Pawlak, Kowalski (10 and 6%) than average for the competition (13 & 12%). Moreover Oljenik does not execute his route-choice 100% optimally, go slightly to far to the left initially. Thus, I will claim that the best right route-choice is at least as fast as the left route-choice via the road on this leg! Agree?
Knut, as a course setter, I agree with you. As you mentioned, Olejnik ran slightly to long in forest out of control. If best runners, that day, would choose right option, I’m sure they will executed it faster than left one. After race I was little surprised they didn’t go right, I thought most of them will do so. Anyway that’s orienteering.
Thanks Knut & Wojciech for your insight! I guess the rightmost option might be a bit trickier to execute, and you may also risk to lose time in the wet areas – but as I understand is faster if executed well?
Wojciech, Jan. Thank you for responding to my comment. I suppose this is an example where the optimal route-choice actually depends on individual strengths and weaknesses and perhaps also on the overall route-choice strategy the runners see as preferred for the competition. E.g., some runners may select the left road to save mental energy, be able to prepare future legs or to get rid of lactate from running continuously on soft ground. Other runners may select the right choice because they run better in the terrain than on road, or to save energy for later in the race by avoiding the tough climb up to the road.
Thanks Knut & Wojciech for restoring my belief in my ability to judge routes at least somewhat accurately. :-)
I was sure that I personally would have lost too much time climbing up to the road but realized that WOC class runners are far stronger uphill. I was still surprised by Jan’s initial conclusion so it was good to learn that the right-hand choice was at least very close.
It is good idea to make some adjustments of specific routes according to the overall individual performance of athletes by use of some data statistics analysis. Then some red options will be more grenish I suppose…