World of O News
– The leg to the 2nd control is one of the best route choice legs I’ve seen this year, and personally I think it’s probably the route choice I was struggling with the most to decide in the last few years. These are the words of elite runner Ivar Lundanes of Ivarnational Orienteering Podcast after the Norwegian Championships Ultralong, written when suggesting the course for Course of the Year 2022.
The Norwegian Champs Ultralong distance is always one of the highlights in Route to Christmas. There were some really long legs in this year’s edition, as always. However, based on Lundanes’ recommendation we chose the quite short leg to the 2nd control for route to Christmas. But even if it is short (for an ultralong race), that doesn’t mean that it is easy to decide….
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.
As you can see, there is a really nice spread in options, with the leg being “as wide as it is long”. Lundanes writes the following about the leg:
The 6 best runners on this leg did 5 very different route choices with some significant time differences and many runners (me included) did other variants that was worse than these 5.
Based on the GPS-data, there are two really good options – the two straightest options (red and blue below, with a variant in-between in purple being slightly slower), with the option to the left (green below), and going quite far around to the left (yellow below) also being quite good choices. Basically it looks like the gains in runnability and/or reduced climb is not enough when going to the left/right – looking at this leg alone. But of course, in an ultralong race it is all about saving energy, so it might be that Forseth Indgaar’s yellow route around to the right saves most energy and therefore is advantageous in the long run, even if the finish times don’t indicate that…?
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 2022-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!
