World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas takes us to some interesting Swiss Jura terrain. The chosen leg is from the International Youth Orienteering Meeting Long distance organized in the end of October. There was also an elite class in the competition, and routes are from a combination of the M20 and M21E course.
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. Based on an initial analysis, it looks quite clear that one should avoid the small paths going straight or to the right, and instead focus on the big paths to the left that allow fast running. The course setter tries to lead runners to the right by the placement of control 2, but still many choose to run to the left out of the control. Based on this first picture it looks like left is fastest, followed by the S-shaped right/left variant, and with straight or right being significantly slower. Digging deeper into the details, it looks like the runners running to the right and straight lose just as much time on this leg as overall on the course (15-16% for the fastest on these routes), and thus the picture is not that clear anymore. Still, based on knowledge in this terrain, I would say going left like Egger and Hubmann should probably be the fastest; these big paths are really fast with the fastest runners running 3:20 – 3:35 min/km for most of the leg when running to the right – it is probably difficult to achieve a pace high enough on the small paths to the right to match this. 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 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!
