World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2022 is again from one of the courses nominated for Course of the Year 2022 – a very interesting leg from the men’s class of the Junior World Orienteering Championships Sprint in Portugal this summer. Thanks a lot to Rafael Miguel 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):
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.
As you can see, there is a wide spread in route choices here – with many runners taking suboptimal choices. Clearly the fastest routes start by going to the right of the line, passing close by control 10, and then either continuing to the left (in S-shape) or to the right at the second part of the leg. Running to the left in the first part of the leg, as chosen by many, is slower due to the semi-open area which is a lot slower to run on than roads. Running too far to the right is too long.
Below the routes chosen by selected top finishers are shown – and as you can see several of the top finishers lost a lot of time already to the first contol. Here is the text from the analysis article at World of O:
Alstad and Emblad lost significant time to the first control (14 seconds) – Alstad due to a slower routechoice (going to the right is clearly slower) while Emblad does a mistake into the control. According to this Tweet several of the medalists passed through a forbidden area towards the first control, including the gold and silver medalist, but this did not lead to any disqualifications. Note that although one of the medalists is in the lead (Angeli), the other medalists are far down on the intermediate results (24th and downwards).
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, 3DRerun or Livelox from 2022-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!
