Route to Christmas: Day 24 2020

For the final leg in Route to Christmas 2020 we found an interesting relay leg from Finland! The leg is from the Klaaniviesti 3-leg relay in Lappeenranta, Finland. Metsälä describes the terrain as very, very tough terrain. – The hills are steep, the ground is rocky and there’s lots of nasty green. Thanks a lot to Tuomas Metsälä for the tip!

This is the last leg in Route to Christmas 2020 – thanks all for following, suggestiong legs and drawing your route daily! Even without many international events this year, you helped finding interesting legs for the calendar!  Merry Christmas all orienteers!

The leg was used on all three legs in the relay . The course setter was Heikki Torniainen from Lappeen Riento (Jukola 2016 course setter). 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. Separate illustrations are shown for each leg, and the pattern is very similar for each leg. Basically, the green and stony areas in this terrain is so slow that you need to avoid it. Thus going around to the left is clearly the best option. There are several possibilities when going around to the left, and it seems like the fastest one is where you exploit as much of the path as possible after the road, whereas before the road you run in the open white area. If you want to dig into the details, I have provided several illustrations for you to understand more about micro-routechoices in this terrain type.

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!