World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from the recent Guangdong Historical Road Orienteering Championships where some of the World’s best sprint orienteers have been gathered for a test ahead of next years’ World Cup races in China. The chosen leg is the 3rd leg from the WRE race in Sanjiang.
Sanjiang is an ancient village with traditional architectural style and narrow alleys winding between the buildings. The village is part of the Guangdong Historical Road with preserved areas. As you can see from the map below, the race offered rather tricky orienteering where you had to keep constant focus. The victory went to New Zealand’s Tim Robertson; his comment at P-W-T.org was “It was so challenging that even with my current lack of speed but a stable performance I was able to win. It was actually only my third time running since the world cup in Czech Republic because I had shoulder surgery right after that. But today I was able to put in a very good performance. I opted for safe route choices where possible and it seemed to be a good tactic today”.
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.
For the more eager of you, there is also a RunningWild of the complete course here. Unfortunately there is no full GPS-tracking of this leg, so we only present a limited analysis with lengths of some routes here. Generally speaking, the main challenge here is to find a good way through the labyrinth of houses and small alleys while still maintaining the orienteering. I would have opted for the red route below, but somebody else might have better ideas?
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!
