Route to Christmas: Day 14 2021

Some love it – and some old-school orienteers hate it: Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2021 is the first sprint leg in this edition of Route to Christmas. The chosen leg is from the Norwegian EOC test-races in Bergen, Norway.

First a request: Please send suggestions for interesting legs for the remaining days of Route to Christmas. I’ve received some tips, but very few of them have GPS-data which makes it possible to make a good analysis, so currently my queue of incoming routes is nearly empty. Legs from GPSSeuranta, Loggator, Livelox, 2DRerun or TracTrac are preferred – RouteGadget is a bit more 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). Fun fact: This is actually not too many meters from where I am sitting writing this – many great sprint areas around here…

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.

For this leg we have used the SPAS-system for analysis (see SPAS analysis for men and women for this leg). That means that instead of using GPS-data, we have asked all runners about which route they chose, and then made statistics based on it (see below).

First you can look at the four alternatives:

Then the length of each of the alternatives:

And finally which route was fun fastest and how many chose it (first for men, then for women who had the same leg). As you can see, variant B and D were run equally fast at 1:11, while most runners chose variant C (9 runners, fastest ran 1:16) vs B (5 runners) and D (1 runners). For the women approximately the same number of runners chose B and C (and none A or D), while her the time difference between the fastest og B and the fastest on D was 10 seconds. So why is C slower? The reason must be that it is steeper, with even some grass running. Interestingly D is run faster than C, as you where avoid some stairs and curves and can have higher speed in the first part of the leg.

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!