Route To O-Season 2020: Day 29

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is another epic leg from a World Orienteering Championships Long distance – this time from WOC 2011 in France. The chosen leg is the very first leg on both the men’s and women’s course – a leg which posed a big problem for many of the athletes. One of the main favourites – a female orienteer from Finland – even gave up without finding this first control. Can you figure out how to solve it?

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 from the GPS-tracks, this was a control which really brought out the best (and worst) in the athletes. Clearly the safest choice is to avoid the tricky hillside (with quite poor runnability) and instead follow the path up in the hillside for quite a long time, and then take the indistinct path down towards the control point. Lundanes runs an impressive 4th place on the leg on a straight(ish) route, but most others lose a lot of time when taking the other route choice options. In the women’s class the time differences are even bigger.

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!