World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is from the night orienteering veteran relay “Oslo Rundt på Stive Bein” in Oslo (Around Oslo on Stiff Legs), Norway two days ago – we are looking at the 5th control on the first leg (mass start).
Yes, that’s right – a night orienteering relay this Friday (thanks a lot to Arild Andersen for the tip)! We also had some other local races around Norway with some 100-150 runners this weekend. Does this mean that the orienteering season has started and we can stop the “Route To O-Season 2020″ after 64 days? For now I am in the “maybe” category, at least I’ll keep going until I’ve finished my backlog of tips (mostly the tricky cases which required some extra work), and then we’ll see. I’m still happy for tips, as long as good tips with analysis keep coming, I’ll try to keep it up for a bit more.
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. It is a big tricky to do the analysis here as the runners have very varying level, but it does seem like the route to the right (either all the way to the right or partially to the right) is the fastest here, but it is somewhat surprising that none of the slower runners chose this route so I might be missing something in the analysis here….? Any thought on the leg, please add in the 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!
Although the running speed is different for the runners it seems that I (Torstein Hole) lost around 2 minutes on my route choice (slightly left but mostly direct) compared to running right.
I would assume I run approx 1 minute slower than Arild Andresen/Christian Grotnes that beat me with 3minutes and would estimate that should be 0,5-1minute faster than Frode Strisland that beat me with 1 minute.
I thought the small path in the direct route looked good, but the runnability around was probably better in total.
Question is if the runners on the right should have taken the small path up to the control instead of all the way around on the road.
Thanks, Torstein! Always nice with an analysis from somebody who has been out there fighting in the dark!
While waiting for my own leg I really liked this one, my immediate favorite was not taken by any of the runners, but I have drawn it above: Start slightly SW to cross the first valley on the low spot, then turn NW along the natural line towards the big partly open marsh. From there I would have followed the paths to the left, almost to Fugleleiken before taking path directly north to the control. I do suspect though that Torstein’s favorite, i.e. right, plus diagonal plus small paths up the hillside would be even faster than going all the way to the road, but with more risk.
Hi Jan, hope you keep ‘route’ going even after the restart. Perhaps not every day but even once a week would be nice.