Route to Christmas: Day 10 2019

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is an interesting long leg in “broken” terrain at O-festivalen in Norway this summer. We have chosen a leg in the women’s class with several distinct options – including some tricky micro-routechoices.

Thanks to Terje Mathisen for the tip – highly appreciated as always.  The tip was for his class M60, but he also opened up for the longer courses like W21E, which was chosen here.

When considering this leg, note that this terrain is in the “Vestfold” region of Norway where the forest is known to be quite dense from time to time. The hills are nice to run on top of, but they are quite steep, so it oftens costs quite a lot of effort to get up to were the runnability is good.  Between the hills the runnability can often be quite bad.

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. It can be noted that an S-shaped route seems to be the fastest choice here – first going fart out to the left of the line, then crossing the line to the right side and finally going straight the last part.

See also here, although it may look like there are only around 20 seconds time difference between left and right:

However, when looking closer at the leg, you can note that Brochman actually runs very fast at the first part of the leg compared to Hafstad, and actually loses around 45 seconds on the route to the left.

Comparing with Elena Roos, we see that Hafstad’s first part of the leg (the one making the big S) is actually not that fast – she loses 19 seconds to Roos here (Roos on the other hand loses 1:45 towards the control):

Runa Fremstad shows another place where you can lose time on micro-routechoices here:

And finally here is Emma Arnesen’s route to the far right:

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!