Route To O-Season 2020: Day 33

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is a course from one of the biggest multi-day events in 2019: The Swiss O-week in Gstaad. The chosen leg is leg 28 in the M21E course from stage 2. Thanks a lot to Duncan Bayliss 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). There is not too much GPS-data today, so please add a comment with your analysis.

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. Only a limited number of GPS-routes are available, but based on the GPS-data it looks like you might lose some time by going down – mainly because the path you follow goes down 25 meters which you have to climb in the terrain afterwards. One could follow the hillside instead of taking the path down and up again, but running in such steep hillsides is usually quite slow. So instead you need to exploit the field edges on the left. You must, however, not run (walk) up too early as Lundanes does – here the hillside is very steep and you lose significant time. Instead you need to take the climb where the hillside is less steep, following either the route of Ruch (3rd overall) or Schalbetter (10th overall) – probably the route of Schalbetter is the faster one, although it is difficult to be sure with the data available. The fastest split time was run by Christoph Meier in 10:38 but his route is unfortunately not available online. Comment from Meier (see below in the comments): I ran a similar route as Schalbetter. I reached the small path a bit earlier in the first section, to have more climb on hard ground. But basically same style of route choice.

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!