World of O News
Ready for some pre-Christmas fun? Today we start the traditional Route to Christmas here at World of O with an interesting route choice leg from the World Cup Final Middle distance in Italy this autumn.
Today’s leg is set in very intricate karst terrain – the ground being quite stony and the orienteering really tricky. 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 (note that these are GPS split times and not actual split times, so they may be a few seconds off). As you can see, some were tempted to run all the way around on the road to the left, but this was clearly too conservative and slow. The best times have mostly been run quite straight, although some choose to use the path to the right at the start of the leg. Note however that the small paths are often difficult to see and follow in this type of terrain – instead using the more distinct bigger holes might be your best friend to orienteer securely. In the 5th image below you can see some blue circles on these kind of more distinct features on Florian Howald’s route to the left. Kasper Fosser’s straight route does not have as many of these, but Fosser still manages to keep in 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 2021-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!
