World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is the longest leg from the Swiss selection race for the World Cup in Norway, the 4th National orienteering race of the year in Switzerland.
This course was suggested (as an honorable mention) from Ivar Lundanes for “Course of the Year 2023” – and as Ivar writes,
This was a brutal course with a lot of technical slope orienteering mixed with tricky route choices
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.
Did you struggle to decide which route is fastest? No wonder – taking a look at how the runners have solved this leg below you can see that three different options are ran approximately equally fast – and thus it probably comes more down to personal skills and tactical considerations than to the fastests route choice from an objective point of view. Take a look at the routes and split times below (from GPS, so might be some seconds off).
Even more easy to see from the color-coded illustration of different alternatives below.
One point of view here is that the course setter did not balance the leg in a perfect way – ideally such a leg should have one route or set of routes which is faster (where you can see which route this is by carefully studying the leg) and other routes that are slower. What would have been the fastest option from the 10th control to the 16th control, for example? I would have run straight, but would people still run left, and what would then be the fastest option?
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 2023-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!
