Route To Christmas: Day 1 2020

Ready for some pre-Christmas fun? Today we start the traditional Route to Christmas here at World of O with an interesting route choice leg from the Norwegian Championships Long distance, organized close to Trondheim.

The international orienteering season 2020 has been nearly non-existent due to Covid-19, and we also already used 100 legs in Route to O-Season this spring. Thus there are less interesting courses and legs than usual in 2020, but we will still try to find 24 interesting legs the coming weeks for Route to Christmas, one each day until December 24th. This year I will be even more dependent on your help to find the interesting legs out there – please send an e-mail to jan@kocbach.net if you have any legs where GPS-routes are available for analysis.

Today’s leg: Norwegian Championships Long, Leg 9

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, even though there is an extra hill towards the end of the leg when going straight, this is clearly faster. Looking at the third illustration below, you can see that this is mainly because runnability in the last half of the leg (particularly in the downhills) is better when going straight. Typically for this terrain type the steeper downhills in valleys are quite slow, and it is also quite slow moving in the slopes, while running straight down less steep hills may be very fast. What do you think about the leg?

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 Christmas series

The Route to Christmas series is a pre-Christmas tradition at World of O – giving the readers the opportunity to do one Route Choice Challenge each day from December 1st until December 24th. If you have got any good legs in GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2020-competitions, or old forgotten ones which are still interesting, please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll consider including it in Route to Christmas if it looks good. Route to Christmas will not be interesting if YOU don’t contribute.

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!