World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from the final stage from the Lapland O Week – far up north in Finland. Thanks a lot to Antti Vainio for the tip!
The chosen leg is the leg from control 17 to 18 quite late on the long course. 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. It is interesting to see that two runners chose to run up to the road which is marked as forbidden on the map, but they probably ran just beside the road. It does look like it is faster to run beside the road than elsewhere in the terrain, but they still lost time on this route as the last part towards the control is slower. It looks like the fastest route is to take some extra height at the beginning of the leg, and then exploit the paths as much as possible. Following around to the right seems slower based on the GPS-data; even if the forest is white it is still faster to take some extra length on paths in this terrain. What do you think? If you know the terrain type well, please add a comment with your thoughts on the leg.
PS! When comparing split time with overall time, please note that the overall time of Artus Paulins is not correct, he skipped some controls towards the end.
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 2020-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!
If you are running to and then along the street, I guess you should follow it much further to the control.
well, even if they ran ‘beside the road’ that’s kind of questionable:
“711 Out-of-bounds route (L)
A route which is out-of-bounds. Competitors are allowed to cross directly over a forbidden route, but it is forbidden to go along it.
An out-of-bounds route shall not be used.”
(it really depends on how far you go from the road. but running parallel to the road but not in does not look reasonable.)
There is a difference between “beside the road” (i.e. either on a pavement, on the verge, or in the terrain) or “along the road” – since this symbol means you aren’t allowed to run along it – but you can cross it.
Now I doubt there was a pavement here so I hope they didn’t run on the road itself as that is clearly OOB (whether such a pavement would be considered part of the road or not is a different question).
[apologies for folks from other english-speaking nations who refer to “tarmac” as “pavement” and use words like sidewalk (US) or footpath (AUS) instead]
That´s what I was wondering too. Froom looking at the map, I do not think it was the organizers and course setters intentation that competitors run along the street