Route To O-Season 2020: Day 39

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is another leg from WOC 2016 Long – the 6th leg in the M21E course from WOC 2016 which was one of the most decisive legs. Here Thierry Gueorgiou lost 80% of the time he lost to Olav Lundanes at WOC 2016 Long.

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.

Here is the analysis from the WOC 2016 Long analysis article: Looking at the 6 best times on the leg (see below), you see that the best 5 times are run on different straight variants. Lundanes runs an extremely fast leg, 0:25 ahead of Hubmann (who is mostly running behind Lundanes here). Basset, Godager Kaas and Dæhli are nearly a minute behind Lundanes, also on straight variants. The best runner around on the path is Andrey Salin at +1:14. With no top runners taking routes around to the right, it is difficult to draw any clear conclusion on straight vs right, but it is probable that there is relatively small difference in time for a good execution on a routechoice to the right and straight.

Looking further at the 30 fastest on the leg, similar times are ran on many different variants.

The key to running a good time here is to get well through the cliffs on the middle part of the leg. Here Lundanes finds a very good way where he minimizes both climb and length. This leg is especially interesting because this is where Gueorgiou lost 80% of the time he lost to Lundanes on the course. Below is a comparison between Lundanes and Gueorgiou on the leg. As you can see, Gueorgiou loses 45 seconds (of 1:17 lost on this leg) through the cliffs in the middle of the leg and the rest up the cliff towards the control. The reason for losing time through the cliffs is that he runs 60 meters longer with 15-20 meter more climb; it is very difficult to count the climb on a 1:15.000 scale map with all the formlines, though.

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!