Route To O-Season 2020: Day 82

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 is a leg from northern Norway featured in a small, local competition just last week (Salten karusellen). Thanks a lot to Håvard Berg for the tip, the illustration and the basis for the analysis.

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). About the terrain Berg writes: “The change between granite and marmor in the terrain gives big variations in the terrain.” This gives some interesting challenges from an orienteering perspective, which the course setter has exploited here.

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.

There is some GPS-data for this leg, but the runners have very varied level. Thus in the analysis we mainly focus on the comments from Berg who has drawn up some alternative routechoices that were run in the competition:

• A 1950m – 70 m climb (blue)
• B 1470m – 115 m climb (red)
• C 1460m – 85 m climb (dark green)
• D 1540m – 95 m climb (light green)
• E 1660m – 90 m climb (dark green)

Running around A may be tempting, but even going around there is 70 meters of climb. D is possibly fastest, even if the highest point is 20 meters higher than the top of the reentrant where B and C come up. But you save some climb as you don’t have to go down, so D only has 10 meter more climb than C, and 20 meters less than B. E is probably too much longer than D to be faster.

Finally routes and times from the race – but don’t trust this too much in your analysis as the level of the runners is very varying:

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!