World of O News
– Awesome “untypical” Finnish terrains with a lot of bigger and smaller route choices even on really short legs, is the description Miika Kirmula gives this terrain in tomorrow’s interview for Course of the Year 2019.
The interview will not be published until December 7th, though, but you can enjoy Kirmula’s favourite routechoice leg of the season already today. The leg is the 7th leg in the M21 course from Finnish WOC selection race Middle – shown below. Kirmula describes the leg like this:
[The race] had really challenging orienteering all the way from the start to the finish. […] This leg was also directly after five short legs so there wasn’t so much time for perfect planning ahead.
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 (note that split times are not official split times, only GPS split times). As you can see, running to the right along the lake is clearly faster, to the surprise of some of the runners. Kirmula puts it this way: – I think it seemed like a risk to run a really steep slope descending to a lake and big cliffs in the end. However the fastest split was made running the leg from the right. I missed the right choice and lost 22 seconds to the fastest split.
When coloring each main routechoice by a separate color, you clearly see how most fast routes are ran to the right – this clearly highlights that there are lots of options to lose time on the micro-routechoices straight and left, while to the right the orienteering is less technical (but with a risk by running along the lake, but this time it paid off – it was also not the biggest risk due to how the terrain there looks on the map).
Finally a comparison between Kratov and Kirmula:
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 or 3DRerun from 2019-competitions – or old forgotten ones which are still interesting – please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll include 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!
