World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a long, special leg from a traditional night-orienteering series in Jyväskylä, Finland (since 1998). The race is JNC Kurko – and the leg is the 6th leg, a really long one, with lots of options.
Thanks to Arttu Syrjäläinen for the tip! Arttu writes the following about this leg: – The event is Kurko Cup – a very traditional night-o serie from Jyväskylä, Finland. During the years, some great orienteers have won the overall Cup – for example Jani Lakanen 2001 and Pasi Ikonen 2006. Total 10 etaps during this autumn and this “JNC Kurko” was one of them. Kurko Cup is almost always a masstart race- about 100 runners each time. Usually some relay forking but this time we had some long legs and only butterfly-loops in the end of the course. Course setters were Arttu Syrjäläinen and Kari-Pekka Seppänen.
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.
As Arttu writes, there are lots of possibility to run all the way around to the left or right, or use some smaller paths more direct. A huge amount of different routechoices and variants were chosen, and the athletes didn’t even use all the different possibilities even if there were lots of runners. But what you all are interested in is probably which route is fastest? Based on the GPS-tracking and split times, it definitely looks like running around all the way to the right is fastest (going backwards out of the 5th control), although time differences between the different options are surprisingly small. What is definitely clear is that if you run to the right, you should run all the way around (not cut through neither in the first half nor in the last half). And if you go left, the fastest is to cut through the forest close to the 9th control instead of going the road around. But if you run this choice and run fast, you would probably be very close to the route all the way to the left, but nobody with GPS ran this route perfectly. Finally, going straight(ish) seems to be significantly slower, but with few runners doing it, it is difficult to be really certain.
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!
