Route To O-Season 2020: Day 4

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 20202 is from a long distance competition in Sweden in April 2019 – Örjetrampen. The chosen leg is the 7th leg in the M21E course. Thanks a lot to the course setter, Andreas Johansson, for the tip!

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. At first sight, going straight or left is fairly equal, with the best time being run straight by Fredrik Bakkman and the three next times being run to the left. Running to the right seems to be clearly slower. When studying split times and finish times in more detail, one can see that the several of the runners taking the route to the left where better on this leg than they were on total on the leg – thus left is probably a better choice here. It is also understandable from the map due to all the path running here. And as the course setter puts it, you also save some power by going left:

For the best runners it seems like left and straight are quite equal in time, but if you are a bit slower you might take advantage of saving some power by going left. If you’d look at a blue/red/green map (Editors comment: scroll one map down), I think left looks a bit better. However, for me as the course setter, I’m very happy that straight wasn’t clearly the best and that I managed to spread out the runners on different route choices.

What is your opinion?

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 O-Season 2020 series

Route Choice Challenges while waiting for the real action: With the upcoming orienteering season indefinitely on hold in large parts of the the world due to COVID-19, regular orienteering route choice challenges may be one way to make sure those orienteering skills don’t get completely rusty. I’ll try to keep these coming daily, but need help from all of you out there to keep them coming and to keep up a certain quality.

Tips on good route choice challenges – either from races/trainings (even cancelled ones) or theoretical ones with accompanying analysis – are very welcome (please e-mail to jan@kocbach.net).

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!