World of O News
With the World Championships in Czech Republic coming up in 2021, elite orienteers are posting lots of interesting routechoice legs from the area. Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is leg 19 in the M21 course from a WOC 2021 Training Camp Long distance training at the Skalacek map.
This course was pointed out as a highlight terrain this season by Miika Kirmula in the interview with him about “Course of the Year 2019″ today – well worth a read. Kiirmula’s description of the terrain is as follows:
– Really tricky areas, but also you need a lot of speed and power in the terrain.
To elaborate a bit more on that, this is terrain where the white forest is really fast, but the steep hills may be slow, and you really need to be careful when choosing your route to avoid too much climb, especially taking the very steep climbs. 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). Good luck – and be sure to check out what is up and what is down!
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. First question: Did you notice what is up and what is down? I have to admit that I was certain that left was going down to the field until I read Filip Grahn’s description of the leg.
For the analysis of the leg, one has to note that this was a training, so the runners probably had different focus and speed, and we can’t fully trust the GPS-routes with respect to the analysis. But what we can see is that going left gives you some extra climb up the hill to the road (and even more climb on the road) which you lose again going down to the road – and finally you get a very steep climb up to the control (these are the ones you want to avoid in this type of terrain).
On the route to the right, you save some climb as you don’t have to go up the extra meters to the road first, and in addition you take the last climb gradually (running) instead of steep (climbing) like on the left routechoice option. Still, the actual time difference may be a lot less than what we see here – probably the difference between left and right is not that much, but at least you save some energy by going right. If you have further comments about the leg (even maybe running it), please add a comment below (I’ll lift it up into the article).
Grahn’s comment: – I chose an S-routechoice which unfortunately wasn’t good. Either I should have taken directly up to the left, or I should have taken the road and up the path in the valley and taken the control from above.
Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (available during the day when some readers have drawn their route).
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 2019-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!
