Route To O-Season 2020: Day 45

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is a leg from the “Sprint course of the year 2018″, the Junior World Championships Sprint in Hungary. The chosen leg is the men’s 8th leg.

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). The leg in itself is not too long, but it is quite complex. Some might think this is too complex for a sprint leg – in my opinion this is a good leg.

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. The shortest route (red, 181 m) takes you back out of the control – a good trick from the course setter. Further, you run under the bridge and back after a 180 degree turn – again something athletes “fear” a bit in their routechoices. It is very tempting to run around to the left (either E, C or D), but you will lose time with such a choice. As you can see from the GPS-tracks below many took the wrong route here, losing valuable time.

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!