Route to Christmas: Day 23 2022

Jan Kocbach December 23, 2022 Orienteering News Comments Off on Route to Christmas: Day 23 2022

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2022 is leg 11 from the long distance race of the Aguiar da Beira Orienteering Meeting (ABOM) 2022 in Portugal. Thanks a lot to Rafael Miguel for the tip!

According to Rafael, the ABOM 2022 long distance race was a tough long distance in very tricky terrain. The leg Miguel has pointed out as most interesting is the leg to the 11th control in the men elite 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.

From the GPS-data it seems quite clear that you should either choose left or right – with several micro routechoices possible for both options. As we get back to further down, the microroute-choices are probably even more important than the overall choice between left and right, but overall it seems that going left is slightly faster. Here the fastest time left is around 1:20 faster than the fastest time right, with the two fastest times run to the left.

Here is a comparison between the fastest left and right:

But when looking at the micro-routechoices of two the two fastest runners to the left, you see that Angeli who is second fastest loses more than 30 seconds in two places along the leg on microroute-choices, thus highlighting the importance of full concentration all the way, and always chosing the best option.

Looking at the two fastest to the right, the fastest runner here actually loses around 15 seconds on the first part of the leg (by going too far around to the left, backwards out of the control) and another 45 seconds on the middle part of the leg by running to the right in the middle part around the houses. Thus, taking together the best parts of the routes of these two runners, you would nearly be at the split time of the fastest going to the left. Definitely an interesting and challenging leg!

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!