World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is a hilly leg from the Danish JWOC test race middle last year. Thanks a lot to Eskil Schøning for the tip and for preparing the analysis!
It was a leg in the JWOC middle distance test races in Denmark last year. A lot of junior squads participated, and many have added their route to 3DRerun (or the Danish system O-track). The leg was the longest on the course, although it was less than 500 meters long. The women’s course had the same leg, but unfortunately not many in that class have added their route.
The terrain is very steep (5m contours), so you don’t want to run too much up and down. Second: The runnability is very good in the white forest while it varies a lot in the green. The forest is pine forest. Some places you can be lucky to be able to run in the direction the trees have been planted but tracks or white forest is where you want to run!
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. Here is the analysis from Schøning:
At first the leg might not seem very interesting, but by looking at the routes you will see that there where a LOT of different choices. The type of terrain for the leg is very typical for this part of Denmark (Silkeborg -WOC 2006 area). The persons who ran the furthest around to the left ran more than double the distance of the fastest on the leg Mikko Eerola from finland. That means they should have run around 3.05/km to have the same time as Mikko.
Straight was clearly the fastest on the leg. It looks like all the left variants are more or less the same. On the straight variant it still differed a lot between taking the optimal line or not. The most important part seems to be whether you choose to run up the last hill in the white forest or in the green. I have made an excel sheet with all the interesting splits of the persons who have uploaded their route (I have left out some routes that disturb the analysis). I did some quick calculations on the %-loss on the leg (compared to top 5) compared to on the course (top 5).
Here is the GPS-data from part of the runners:
And here is Schøning’s Excel table:
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!
