Route To O-Season 2020: Day 22

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 takes us back to another epic long route choice leg from a World Orienteering Championships: The longest leg in the women’s WOC 2010 Long distance in Trondheim, Norway. What a spread in the chosen routes!

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 (splits are from the official split times – note that Hausken is missing, but she took the route to the right and had nearly the same speed as Claesson). Clearly going first left and then right is fastest. Fastest of all is Jansson who runs over the hill, but it seems safer to take Claesson’s route (passing along the lake) as 2nd, 3rd and 4th fastest time is run along this route, which has less technical orienteering and is less physical than going over the hill.

This visualization gives some more insight in how fast the different variants are:

And finally a comparison of some of the main routechoices:

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!