World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2021 is another Sprint leg. This Sprint leg is from Team Latvia’s training towards the European Orienteering Championships. The city is Talsi and course setter was Olli-Markus Taivainen. Thanks a lot to Janis Tamuzs for the tip and for preparing analysis.
The leg in question is from a sprint-relay interval training course. As this was a training event, it was possible to set a course with many fake obstacles (not there in reality!) which created a nice challenge in one of the best sprint terrains in Latvia. There was a little bit of snow on the ground that day, making slopes rather slippery.
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. This shows that the runner going to the left has lost significant time, but we need to look at the leg in more detail to understand more – see below the illustration.
Janis has been of great help here and measured up the length of the main alternatives. First of all, it is clear that the long route to the left is slower. It is 50-60m longer and, even if the orienteering is simpler, it is too long and there are two (slippery) slopes to go down and up. This is a typical type of leg where the course setter can trick the runner into taking a wrong routechoice because it looks to complex on the fastest route. The Latvian team were not ready to be fooled here, though. See below for a closer look on the artificial fences to the right.
Then it is a question of going through town with artificial fences. Not a lot of time differences here, mainly it was important to (1) understand that right is faster and (2) spot all the forbidden areas and fences on the map to not get trapped. That is, planning ahead!
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!
