Route To O-Season 2020: Day 47

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is leg 5 in the W21E course from Finnish Championships Long 2018 – the men’s course from the same race was one of the finalists in “Course of the Year 2018″.

This race was featured in Route to Christmas 2018 – but then we took a look at a similar leg in the men’s class.

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). This is a long leg. It has paths. It has roads. It has tough uphills – and tough choices for you as a runner. What would you choose?

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. This is a special leg that deserves some comments – please provide your thoughts about the best solution on the leg!

Then you can take a look at how the runners have solved this leg below. As you can see, going right on the road clearly paid off, with the four fastest runners taking the road. This is nearly as for the similar men’s leg in Route to Christmas 2018. The straight/left option is a bit too tough, but still good times are run here. Going all the way around to the left is definitely too long!

Update: Based on some calculations done in the comments, around to the left is too long to have fun, but no too long to run a good time on the leg. Going around to the left on the road should be approximately equal (at least) to Rudnaya’s route. Looking at the speed on the road for Rudnaya compared to Hirvonen, Rudnaya seems to be around 4:00 min/km elsewhere in the course while Hirvonen is around 4:45 min/km for the 4(!) km on road/big path on this leg. This corresponds to around 3 minutes difference, which is the difference between Rudnaya and Hirvonen on the leg. So similar times should at least be possible. Thanks to Jarkko and Terje for their comments!

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!