World of O News
In today’s edition of Route to Christmas we are travelling to Finland and the world’s largest orienteering relay: Jukola. We are joining around 1400 runners at the 6th leg in the relay – a long leg between control point 13 and 14.
The leg is suggested by Tobia Pezzati, who writes: – I think the leg 13-14 of the 6th leg of Jukola was quite interesting, especially because going straight it was quite difficult to understand which line could be the best one […] In addition there were also some alternatives quite far from the line. (PS! Still looking for good suggestions – drop a line to jan@kocbach.net!)
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, there are lots of different variants being run straight – and this only by this small group of GPS-tracked teams. These split times are based on GPS, so actual split times may be a few seconds off. Based on the GPS split-times, the time difference between the fastest runner going around on the road to the right (Koovee, running 3:53 min/km) and the best straight is only a few seconds – still very few of the GPS-tracked teams chose to take the road. Probably more teams could have benefitted from going around as there are quite a few micro routechoices to be done straight, and many probably lost some time by doing non-optimal micro route choices. That said, you’d have to be pretty fast on the road to keep up with Koovee here.
Here is a comparison between the fastest straight and the fastest to the right: Exactly equal on the part where Koovee runs around on the road – the time Koovee loses is towards the control.
On the straight variant one good option (see Ravinen below) is to use the white whenever you can, and avoid the biggest climbs. The small paths may look tempting, but you can do very well without it – rather try to find the good runnable white areas.
And finally the different alternatives each in one color – by looking at the times to the left you can see that three different routes have been run at approximately the same time. Going left seems to be significantly slower. The rightmost of the straight versions does also seem to be somewhat slower.
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 is a pre-Christmas tradition at World of O – 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 2017-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!
