World of O News
In today’s edition of Route to Christmas we travel to flat – but yet interesting – terrain in Finland. The chosen competition is the Finnish Championships, and the chosen leg is the long leg to control 8 in the men’s class. Thanks a lot to Anssi Vesanto for the tip!
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 in several illustrations. First the traditional illustrations with routes colored by leg time and by variant:
As Vesanto writes in his description of the leg, “even the top ten of that leg spread about 1 km apart from each other according to their route choices”. Looking more closely at the route choices, you can see that running to the left of the lake seems to be clearly slower due to the slower and more broken terrain there, while running around on the road to the right is clearly too long, even if Kirmula manages to run 3:20 – 3:30 min/km, 850 meter extra (more than 33% longer) is too much here. Of the variants to the right of the lake, it looks like there are many good alternatives with small time differences after the marsh/lake, although you can lose time by taking a bad micro-routechoice here. The bigger difference seems to be before and including the marsh where Ojanaho first finds a very good micro-routechoice out of the control, but then loses 20 seconds over the marsh by going too far left. This might not be too easy to see from the map, though.
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!
The marsh just to the right of the OOB area (lake or dangerous marsh?) would typically be far wetter than a bit further away, so aiming for the point where there is a tiny one-ring knoll is an obvious choice, and here it would have avoided the 20s time loss Ojanaho had on this crossing.
Good point, Terje, thanks for the comment!