World of O News
Ready for a 4 km long leg. At night? Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is leg 4 in the M21 course from the final of Harry Lagerts night orienteering cup – a traditional night orienteering competition in the Oslo-area in Norway. If you dare to start in this race, you are a tough orienteer!
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. Note that this was a chasing start, so runners might have been influenced by other runners in their choice. As you can see, there were very few of the really tough night orienteers – the ones going straight in tough, hilly terrain for around 5 km – and for more than 70 minutes! Big kudos to those two in the GPS-tracking (there might have been some without GPS-tracking as well). All others chose to go around to the right, using different routechoices.
Thus the fastest route on this 4 km leg is actually nearly 7(!) km of running!
The fastest route was run on the road all the way until just before “Liggeren”, then turning onto the path in the open area, and continue using a combination of small paths and open areas. It looks tempting to take the road all the way to around the 9th control, and take paths from there. Based on the split times alone it may look faster to cut through from Liggeren, but looking at that part of the routes isolated you can see that going all the way around is actually just as fast, or maybe even a bit faster. Thus the fastest route on this 4 km leg is actually nearly 7(!) km of running! Take that for supper!
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!
Jan, did you speak with Einar Jensen, the course planner? I did the setup for Livelox and Live GPS tracking before the race and both Einar & I were very disappointed that noby ran our preferred route choice, an S curve starting on the road to the right, then crossing to left via Tømte (the small farm in the middle), and take the path to the dam on the west end of the lake. From there you have more paths almost all the way to the control!
Thanks for the comment, Terje. No, I did not communicate with the course planner. I am not convinced that is faster though, but it should at least be faster than going straight!