World of O News
In today’s Route to Christmas we travel to one of the most interesting orienteering countries, Switzerland. The chosen leg from the Swiss Champs Long distance, and the tip again comes from Jonas Wäfler.
The forest is typically “Mittelwald” with many paths/roads, and variable runnability in the forest (white being fast, though). 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, Joey Hadorn has the fastest time running all the way to the left (Hadorn misses 3 minutes on the next control, though). The advantage with Hadorn’s route to the left is that he has a lot of road running which is either downhill, flat or slight uphill, and as a very fast road runner he can keep high speed, faster than 4 min/km for most of the leg (and even below 3 min/km in the downhill). For the route to the right (were Matthias Kyburz, 3rd in the race and Daniel Hubmann, 1st in the race run), there are some steeper uphills which slows down. However, looking at the illustrations below, it looks like the main reason for Hadorn being faster than Kyburz is his higher running speed – a typical example where Hadorn finds the route which suites him best and executes it perfectly (although he has to pay on the next control).
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!
