World of O News
We continue with the 10Mila focus in Route to O-Season 2020. Today we take another look at 10Mila 2016 – this time at the 4th leg – “Långa natten”.
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. Many of the top teams decided to take a straight/left choice (IFK Göteborg, Halden SK & co) which is nearly a minute slower than running straight down to the road and following this until the bend. It is kind of tricky to take the control from this side, but on the other hand it is not much easier if you go the more straight route.
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!
Interesting leg, but it is hard to judge from the GPS’s what’s the best in a relay, particularly in darkness, as your route choice in many cases depends on what the other teams around you do. Most runners will still run faster on a less optimal route together with a bunch of other teams, than take a faster route alone. Surprised not to see more of the better teams do the safer right route choice, but again it depends on the openness of the terrain and what the leader of the pack does (most likely Oleksandr Kratov in this case). OK Linné does a decent split on a partly right choise. Could he have done better by going all around on the track; he seems to hesitate a bit in the beginning.
I agree that going right is probably better than it looks here, but note that you use quite some time to get up to the road on right compared to left, so I definitely think left is a very good choice, here, better than one may think at first sight, and probably the fastest choice?
NTNU’s speed 4:36 km/h for the entire leg is impressing. It seems clear that the difficult green and green-striped entrance to the control didn’t slow NTNU and his group down significantly (although the average speed probably was below 4:00 min/km before starting the final approach). I also think the right route-choice looks tempting, it is only some 80 meters longer than left and has better runnabiliity and is easy to execute optimally. Clearly right is faster than the route-choice of Linne. However, right has at least 20 meter extra climb which corresponds to another 140 m, and that will most likely make right slower. This is quite typical for many different types of terrains, especially in spring, difference in climb is more important than difference in “map-runnability”.