Route to Christmas: Day 2 2018

A crazy long leg for today’s edition of Route to Christmas: 4.7 kilometers along the straight line, and with several athletes running more than 6 kilometer on this single leg. Without paths. That’s orienteering! Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is leg 17 in the M21 course from Norwegian Championships Ultralong 2018.

[PS! No tips for Route to Christmas so far this year, I hope that will change soon. I’m waiting for your tips to showcase the most interesting legs of 2018!]

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 possibilities here, and with GPS tracking from a limited number of runners it is tricky to be 100% confident as to which route is the best. It is a bit easier to get the overview on the map one step below, though – the discussion continues there.

Here we have one color for each of the major alternatives; left is red, blue is right, and purple/green is inbetween. The fastest time is ran by Jo Forseth Indgaard (finishing the race in 4th place at +11:14 overall) on a blue route, while the winner Olav Lundanes runs a red route and second placed Gaute Hallan Steiwer (green; +8:14 overall) runs the green route. Lundanes has more path running (although that path is probably not much help) but runs 600 meters longer than Indgaard. Hallan Steiwer runs a few meters shorter, but the extra climb is not worth it.

Based on the information available, going to the right is probably the best alternative, with Forseth Indgaard finding a good route through the marshes and around the lakes.

Here is a direct comparison of the two fastest runners.

And finally elevation profiles for the tracks from Statens Kartverk. First Indgaard:

Then Lundanes:

The elevation profiles where not good enough to extract climb for each route here, but if somebody has a boring, rainy Sunday, it is possible to help out and count contours crossed for each route to find the climb. Add a comment if you feel like making the effort!

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (will be updated).

Additional information

You find the complete map in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Route to Christmas series

The Route to Christmas series 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 GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2018-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!