World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is an exotic one for many – we travel to Japan for a routechoice leg from the Japanese Long distance orienteering championships.
This course was suggested for the “Course of the Year 2023″ – head over and add your nominations for “Course of the Year 2023″ within Monday to get a chance to be part of the voting.
Thanks to course planner Koji Kashimada I got a small introductury text about the terrain, on behalf of the organizers:
This terrain, named ‘Katsura- Ohkusu’, is located 70km southeast of Tokyo mega-city and one of typical terrain in Japan with an intricated small hill and valley. Ricarrdo (from Italy) and Maelle (from France, in W21E) both took 2nd place with great runs. Both runner had some trouble for route choice in the first part of the race. But they soon learned how to run in this forest and competed well with well-experienced local runners. We Japanese orienteer are very impressed by their ability to adapt to any kind of terrain.
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). To give you the possibility to learn just as Riccardo and Maelle, we will provide a second leg from this race tomorrow – but for now concentrate on the leg to the 8th control.
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, it seems like running around to the left on the small path is clearly faster in this terrain, although straight looks very tempting on the map. It may seem like the marshes are are quite slow in this terrain – and also going straight through the winding contours – making the path alternative better. The course setter confirms this: “- The route with path (go around) is almost flat, and straight route has steep climb of approx. 60m”
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!
