World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is leg 15 in the Oceania Orienteering Champs Long at the very start of the year. I’ve searched for legs outside Europe, and was happy to find this one!
In this terrain one of the most important things is to avoid the greens, some of them are impenetrable and you can lose minutes in a very small section of it.
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.
Here are Aston’s thoughts on the leg out in the forest:
With [avoiding the green] in mind any routes to the left are almost ruled out! When running the leg myself I saw the massive hill in the beginning and naturally wanted to avoid it somehow. But looking at the rest of the leg I saw that that you had to get onto the top of the hill to avoid the very steep gully’s with lots of green. This way I avoided all the green and had fast open forest from the top of the hill all the way to the control.
From the map samples, you see that most runners actually chose different variants which went around to the right, like Aston. However, only a few saw Aston’s choice to the right out of the control, where you can save some time due to a more gradual slope angle and a path starting up the hill.
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!
