Route To O-Season 2020: Day 58

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is another one in the 10Mila series – this time we visit “Långa natten” from 10Mila 2018. The chosen leg is the longest leg – leg 9. Thanks again to Viktor Antonsson for the tip!

[More tips needed: We are finished with the 10Mila week, and are ready for other challenges. I have some tips which I follow up, but need more for the days to come – please send an e-mail to jan@kocbach.net if you recall any interesting legs]

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). Note that it may seem like the runners got a bit more map on the right side than shown in the GPS-tracking, i.e. the small path which goes out of the map comes back in some hundred meters later.

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. As you can see, the terrain is fairly fast with the Fredrikstad SK running straight without paths in not entirely flat terrain on 5:27 min/km (at night). However, even though the route goes “straight”, there are many small curves to avoid hills and areas with slower runnability (green areas, marshes etc.). Thus, even if OK Linné runs quite far away from the line to the left, the route is only 100 meters longer, and thus even if there is not that much path/road running to the left, OK Linné manages to run faster on this left variant (5:13 min/km). Looking at the routes here, it does however look like execution and micro-routechoices is more important than main routechoice with respect to left vs direct. The route to the right, however (out of this map; Nydalen SK is fastest) is nearly 700 meters longer then going left, and is therefore definitely slower.

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!