Route To O-Season 2020: Day 83

Today’s leg in Route to O-Season 2020 takes us to some “exotic” terrain in Belarus – the EYOC long distance last year. This course was also nominated for “Course of the Year 2019″.

Thanks a lot to Dmitry Mironov for the tip and for providing GPS-data for the routes. 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. As you can see, the overall winner of the race, Ferenc Jonas (Hungary), “magically” managed to run straight, hit the control and win the leg clearly. When Jonas proves that it is possible to run this fast straight, this is a leg where straight is probably the fastest for the best orienteers. However, running the safe route to the right on the fields is not that much slower (39 seconds), and looking closer at the speed on the field one can see that there are runners who are significantly faster on the field (e.g. Bonek), and thus it should be possible to run nearly Jonas’ time around on the field. With the orienteering straight being quite tricky, I suspect most runners would benefit from taking the route around on the field. What do you think?

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!