Route to Christmas: Day 23 2024

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is from the long distance race Langløpet, organized this November in the Oslo-area. Thanks a lot to Arild Andersen for the tip!

This was a mass start event with some big stars on the start line – including Kasper Fosser and the Norwegian Junior Team. We have chosen the third leg on the “Middle”-course – the course with most starters and where also Fosser and the Norwegian Junior Team participated.

If you want to get a feel for the terrain, you can take a look at the below headcam-video from the course (runner: Serhii Kizievs). The video is set to start at control 2, i.e., the headcam-runner is just starting on the leg featured in today’s edition of Route to Christmas (but don’t trust this runner when doing your choice). Here is also the report from the race on the organizers’ webpage.

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. The leg was run in both the long and medium course, but the medium course is chosen for analysis as this is where there were most runners on the start. The routes are colored according to fastest split time on the leg, with the fastest routes in green and the slowest in red.

Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.

And here the main variants shown separately:

As you can see, most runners chose the green, most straight variant – and this was also the fastest variant – with the 6 fastest times run along the green variant.  No top runners chose to run around to the right. Here is what Snorre Veggan of the course setting team has to say about the leg:

The idea was to have a leg where those who run fast but aren’t strong navigators could go around to the right on roads and trails without losing too much time, despite some climbing. They’d also get an easier entry to the control. Normally, it doesn’t pay off to run straight in Østmarka, but the terrain here is nice enough that, despite a somewhat vague and tricky approach to the control, going straight is a good option as long as you hit the control. Still, it would have been interesting to see how fast Kasper Fosser would have run on the right-side route, which is around 2.2 km—about 0.6 km longer than going straight—and mostly on road and good trail. With a pace of just over 4 min/km, he would have ended up with a time about the same as going straight. Not impossible.

It should also be noted that this leg comes only 1 km after the start, and since there was a mass start for both the long and middle courses, with 125 runners, many were likely influenced by others’ route choices in the group. If the leg had come near the end of the course or with individual starts, more runners might have chosen the right route. This time, it was all about execution and whether you could keep control of the ridge leading to the control, which decided the times.

For a night orienteering race, going around to the right might probably have been a more relevant alternative for more runners?

Below the variants are shown according to leg result.

Chosen variant ordered by leg result

(Note that the overall position shown after each athlete is not correct)

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!