World of O News
Today we travel to the World’s biggest multiday orienteering event – O-Ringen in Sweden. O-Ringen’s day 4 was pointed out as one of the best courses of the year by several in “Course of the Year 2018″, and the long leg from 11 to 12 in the men’s elite class is definitely a very good candidate for Route to Christmas.
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). We have got a valley in the middle of the leg, we’ve got varying runnability, we’ve got the possibility to run on paths and some stony ground to take into account. Which route would you have chosen?
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, Magne Dæhli’s fastest route was quite straight, but following the slope for the first half of the leg. The next map sample below gives some more insight into the different alternatives.
On the map below you see the alternatives in different colors along with time of the runners. As you can see, the three fastest runners took blue and red alternatives (straight or slightly left). Going left (green/purple) is also quite OK. So to sum up the main time loss here is from bad “micro-routechoices” (there are many choices to be made along the main routechoices) and from bad execution – as we often see in international orienteering. This was also the fourth stage in a multiday-competition, so some runners were probably starting to tire.
Comparing William Lind with Magne Dæhli you can see that it is not crucial to keep up in the slope; Lind runs down the slope early and uses the power line on part of the leg, and is still faster than Dæhli on this part of the leg.
From Novikov’s route around to the left it looks like it is the first uphill which is tough and takes quite some time.
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 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!
