Route to Christmas: Day 20 2018

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from the Baltic Championships Long in Latvia near the city of Rēzekne on the Tartaks lake map. This is fascinating terrain, and a great course with many nice and long route choices made this a day to remember. The chosen leg is the 19th leg in the M21 course.

Big thanks today to Janis Tamuzs for the tip and the full analysis – this kind of input makes the job so much easier!

The Baltic Championship is a traditional race in the Baltic region where Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian orienteers meet every year – the last couple of years joined also by the St. Petersburg and Belarus teams, making it perhaps the second strongest regional championship in the world after the European Championship.

One of the most decisive leg was a leg in the second part of the race – the leg from control 18 to 19. 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 (analysis below the two first map images).

Clearly the different routes to the left where the fastest – either using the road a lot like Jubelis, or using a combination of the small and large path in a more direct approach like Paulins. The map does give away that runnability is worse straight (both due to hills and various vegetation features), so it is no big surprise that straight is not fastest here for somebody looking at this from behind the computer. Maybe the reason that the runners overlook it is the shape of the unpassable marsh just ahead of the control, making it necessary to make a quite big curve on the “straight” route?

Here is Janis’ analysis about how this affected the race –  and with some more details about the different routes (see route comparisons further down):

• Artūrs Pauliņš [7:42 time; 1st split time; 1st overall] (Latvia) chose a good option, cutting over terrain where it was nice, spotting the small path in the middle of the leg and arrived to the control from the road. Here he took the lead and never let it go, finally winning the race.
• Andrey Salin [8:38; 8th; 2nd] (Belarus) chose a bit worse route choice, lost 56 seconds and the shot at winning the title.
• Edgars Bertuks [9:26; 25th; 6th] (Latvia) also took the wrong route and lost 90’’ in this leg and it was first of mistakes that dropped him out of medal contenders. His route was simply too wild.
• Lauri Silds’ [9:17; 20th; 4th] (Estonia) route choice took him too far around with no gain in running surface and he lost 1:20.
• Jonas Vytautas Gvildys [9:46; 32nd; 12th] (Lithuania) missed the best route as well, going too straight in the beginning of the leg, losing 1:50 and letting Artūrs Pauliņš pass unseen during the race.

Going left and using the roads was clearly the best option and it was well used by Andris Jubelis [7:52; 2nd; 3rd] (Latvia) and Dmitry Tsvetkov [8:12, 3rd, 5th] (St.Petersburg) who climbed a few places and Jubelis even finished third in the end even if he was only 9th at control 18.

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!