World of O News
Today’s Route to Christmas takes us to a long leg in a hilly terrain in Denmark. – Lots of challenging route-choices and I think the course-planner did a good job out of a limited terrain, Junior World Champion Kasper Fosser said about the Junior World Orienteering Championship (JWOC) Long distance M20 course – and selected this course as his favourite forest course in 2019.
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is the longest leg on this course, the leg to the 7th control in the M20 course from JWOC Long. 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 routechoice options, but the routechoices can be divided into left (using the road and bigh path) or right/straight (following smaller paths with a bit more complex orienteering). Many have chosen to run to the left, which is very tempting here because orienteering is easy and straightforward, and you avoid running an S-shape. On first sight it also looks like it isn’t much longer to go left than right.
Studying the routes in more detail, see below where Lilands’s route to the right is compared with Aebersold’s route which is the fastest route to the left (we take Fosser out of the equation because he simply runs much faster), it is clear that left is actually more than 300 meters longer, and that it might be easy to underestimate how much time that extra climb up to the control from behind takes.
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!
