World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas from the Legends-class in a tough, long night orienteering race organized in the Oslo-area in Norway in October this year: The Harry Lagerts final race. In the middle of Nordmarka at dead of night, in a rough forrest terrain, shrouded in mist and rain for the occasion. Thanks a lot to Mathias Benjaminsen for the suggestion!
When considering the leg, remember that this was a night race; this year it was rain and fog it gave the Legends class a truly legendary feel. This leg was actually decisive for the win in the race according to Benjaminsen ;Nordberg, Ekeberg and Kampstrup chosing two different alternatives with significant time difference. 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, Nordberg goes straight while Kamstrup and Ekeberg go around. Nordberg also misses the control, but he would have lost significant time (several minutes) also without missing the control.
Below you can see a comparison of Ekeberg and Nordberg. You can simply run significantly faster on the road than you can on the small tracks in this terrain. While Nordberg runs around 6 min/km on the path, Ekeberg runs around 4:20 min/km on the road. With several kilometers to run – and some running in the forest on the direct route in addition, this adds up to minutes in the end.
Here you can also see the times for the different alternatives:
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!
Einar Jensen from Nydalens SK was the course planner, we discussed the leg a week or two before the race:
Einar had originally planned control #8 much closer to the road so I complained that the road route was too obvious and suggested he move it 60-80 m further uphill. In the end Einar decided to move it even higher up, to where I would have guessed the routes were close to equal. This was sufficient to trap several runners including famous “Långa Natten” runner Anders Nordberg who was leading and would probably have won the race if he had taken the road route.
In my opinion, this is not a good orienteering leg. It is a wholesome 4 minutes faster to run the road, and it is 3,5 km of non-orienteering. Courses at this level should benefit the best orienteerers, not the best runners.
Agnar, have you taken a look at the full course tracking?
https://www.livelox.com/Events/Show/28715
This course had a lot of interesting route choices, and the actual time difference was far less than 4 minutes for a perfectly executed straight route, Anders made several mistakes. The key was of course that the road option meant about 15 minutes of mental relaxation and/or time to plan the rest of the course.