World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a long leg from the largest individual orienteering race in the world: O-Ringen. The chosen leg is from the chasing start on the fifth and last day in the women’s elite class. The men had a similar leg which is also included in the discussion of the route below.
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, Tove Alexandersson takes a route to the right (blue color in the first illustration) and beats everybody with at least a minute. However, Alexandersson was at a different level than the other runners on this day (as she often is), and was nearly 9 minutes faster than the second fastest runner Johanna Öberg, with Anna Bachman some seconds behind. Thus the split times on this leg must be studied with this background. Actually Bachman is “only” 6% behind Alexandersson on this leg, while she is 12% behind Alexandersson overall on this stage. Also, one can note that if not including Alexandersson in the analysis, the 5 fastest runners have taken routes to the left. Thus it may seem like a variant to the left is fastest. It is, however, not fully clear from the map why the variant to the left should be faster. The length of both options is approximately the same, and there are some meters more climb to the left. It may be that the marshes on the right are slower? It may also be that the chasing start has influenced the results here? Any comments are very welcome, especially from runners.
The men had a very similar leg:
Here also left is fastest, but note that the control at the start of the leg is further to the left, and thus it should be even better to go left on this leg. Also, the time differences are very small here.
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!
