World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 takes us to an interesting leg in French karst terrain at OOCup 2024. Not the longest leg, but still challenging to decide what to do.
In the bulletin the terrain was described as hilly terrain, nice mixed forest with many relief details, some boulders and cliffs but overall not overly rocky. Some thickets and parts with low visibility. This was actually one of the most interesting terrains I ran in this year – the terrain feels much more tricky out in the forest than when looking at the map, so one should be quite careful with the orienteering. The low visibility contributes to the difficulty – in addition the paths are not easy to see in the 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).
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. First an illustration where the routes are colored according to split time.
Then below an illustration where the routes are colored according to variant. Four of the five fastest choose a variant that goes a bit to the right of the straight line (green) – while one athlete runs quite fast on the route to the left (blue). The route all the way to the right (red) seems to be much slower from the GPS-data, but it looks like none of the runners executed the route all the way to the right well, so it should be possible to run it quite fast here. The reason for the green route being faster is probably because it is the shortest route while still having relatively modest climb. Going red feels safe, but the green route is too fast for red to 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, Loggator or Livelox from 2024-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 gets interesting due to YOUR 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!
