Route to Christmas: Day 12 2020

Today’s edition of Route to Christmas travels to Spain and the middle distance race of Maximum O-Meeting which was organized west of Madrid this February. 

The chosen leg is the 7th leg, which was common for the men’s and women’s elite course. The men’s class is chosen for analysis as quite few women have uploaded routes compared to men. Thanks a lot to Raúl Ferra 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):

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 the GPS-data, it seems like the main thing you need to consider when choosing your route on this leg is runnability, avoiding climb, and the possibility to simplify your orienteering. Going around to the right seems tempting, but based on the posted routes it looks like it is quite time-consuming to get down to the yellow area and the paths (which is very fast runnable), and then again very slow up to the control. Running to the left saves you climb, and you run in quite flat terrain in white forest, which is fast runnable compared to the slopes which have also partly dense forest. Even if the orienteering may look kind of tricky at first sight when running around to the left, there are quite well defined contours, and thus you can do most of your orienteering based on contours only along with some large features (cliffs, power line), and thus keep the speed quite high without bothering so much about all the stones and other details.

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!