World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is leg 6 in a shortened Long Distance organized in Tenerife in early January. Thanks to Alvar Palmén for the tip and to Thierry Gueorgiou for help with the analysis.
The course is from a training camp at Tenerife with the national teams of Norway and Finland present, along with a smaller group from the Swedish national team. Course setter was Thierry Gueorgiou.
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). When considering the leg, please note that the stony areas are a bit more stony than what it looks from the map.
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. Note that Kasper Fosser did this shortened long distance as an interval training, so his route/split should not be given too much weight.
Here you see the routes colored by variant:
From Thierry, I also got the route from Topi Syrjäläinen for comparison. Topi runs around to the right at approximately the same time as Eirik Langeland Breivik who is the fastest in the graphic above.
Thierry writes the following in his analysis:
There is about 30 seconds difference as I think both Topi and Lukas are having the same running/orienteering skills. I feel it is explained by the nature of the terrain. The stony areas are a bit more stony than what it looks from the map. And you can see the speed of Topi to reach the first crossing is not that good even though it looks like a nice white forest.
See below for a speed comparison which illustrates this nicely:
The “vulcano hill”looks like this, steep and much power walking:
And as you can see in Topi’s track, his speed is not spectacularly high when approaching the control as the visibility is not that good on top:
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!
