Route To O-Season 2020: Day 35

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season is another route choice leg from a World Orienteering Championship long distance – this time from back in Italy in 2014. The chosen leg is the 15th leg in the men’s course which offered some interesting route choices.

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 World of O’s analysis of the leg from back in 2014:

The third and last real long leg in the course was the leg from 14 to 15. The fastest route here is going left on the road – the two fastest on the leg Dahlgren (8:42) and Losch (8:59) both ran left. Lundanes and Hubmann lose 19/22 seconds respectively by going right. Gueorgiou also runs right, but loses even more time; 31 seconds to Dahlgren. It is not possible to see from Gueorgiou’s inaccurate GPS at this point what the reason for the time loss is.

The last option is to go straight. Adamski executes direct well and is the fastest of the one choosing this route. He loses 45 seconds to Dahlgren. Hertner also runs direct, but loses control towards the end of the leg – losing even more time (1:11). With this he goes from 2nd to 4th place at this point in the race.

Kyburz loses direction on the middle of the leg, and loses a lot of time (1:44).

See the full analysis of the men’s WOC 2014 Long here.

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!