Route To O-Season 2020: Day 69

In today’s Route to O-Season 2020 we have another tip from Norway – this time from the final in the Harry Lagerts night race cup 2016. The chosen leg is the longest leg on the course, a tough one! 

Thanks a lot to Søren Jonsson for the tip. This is one of the last tips in my mailbox, so we are moving towards the end of this series (we have one with a really nice back-story from Finland still to go, though, and one from GB which involves quite a lot of work to prepare).

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. Note that these are GPS-times and not official split times, and Bjør Ekeberg’s time is to the point just ahead of the control before he started to make a mistake (his actual split time is probably a minute slower). Left is the route that has been run fastest among the runners, and when taking your time and studying it in more detail, it looks very probable that this is also the best route on the leg. It is some 200-250 meters longer than the most straight route of Kasper Fosser, but the advantage is that you avoid the steep climbs, you can take most of the climbs on a path and you do a lot of path running. The paths here are small, but they are still faster than the terrain (mostly at least).

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!