It is time to start thinking about orienteering. The fall O' season is fast approaching. So, I created this little armchair map excercise. The link will take you to a map with a leg. It shows a long leg from the 1986 Swedish 5-Days. My route is drawn in.

The map file is fairly large (about 149K). I'd suggest you open it in another browser window, take a good look at the leg, and then post your thoughts about the route choice.

How would you run this leg? Why did I go so far out of the way? Is there a better route?

http://www.geocities.com/okansas.geo/route1.html

-- Michael (meglin@juno.com), September 06, 2000

Answers

I looked at the leg a bit. I seems like an interesting route choice, but I don't really seen anything particularly better-looking than the route Spike drew in. Much depends on the speed of the woods because there is a choice between running on roads or through the woods.

I don't think Spike went extremely far out of the way. His route may be 40-50% longer than the straight line. But how many people wouldn't run that much faster on the road than the woods of Sweden? The actual straight route that I like is to the middle H20 stop then up the road under the power lines, down the trail to the west, across the marsh and along the ride towards the control. That is still a bit off the straight line. I would suspect it isn't a very good route. Spike's route would save a bit of "heavy" running in the woods and marsh. It would also be an opportunity to look the rest of the course over. This route is also very easy to execute so there is no danger of losing significant time, except possibly taking the last 300m to the control. My guess is that this is the first long leg of the course.

-- Mook (everett@psi.edu), September 07, 2000.

Careful what you're calling "west", Mook, since this map has south at the top. I somewhat prefer going right of the line, getting 2/3 of the way to the control on a dirt road and coming across/around the marshes at the end, heading SE (which looks like NW on this view). Shorter that Spike's route, and there is some potential for error in the last section, although the long cliff before the control should be a decent collecting feature.

-- J-J (jjcote@juno.com), September 08, 2000.

My strategy at this race was to be careful and to run on trails whenever I could. There were a couple of reasons for this strategy. The marshes were pretty tough. In some parts of Sweden you can slog across a marsh, but in this area you'd risk sinking up to your knees. It didn't help that it rained throughout the entire 5-day competition. I was also influenced by a presentation by Anders Erik Olsson -- who won the M21 elite category and the prior year's university world champs. Olsson talked about looking far off the straight line and taking his time to select a route. He claimed he spent 30 seconds studying one leg. I remember being impressed with his description of how he'd run.

I also remember Olsson, however, talking about looking at a long leg and quickly deciding that it didn't matter which route you took -- they'd all be pretty even, so just pick one quickly.

I'm not really sure how Olsson figured out when to spend a long time studying a leg and when to make a quick choice.

Another part of my strategy was to avoid any big errors. This leg is from the Swedish 5-days. One way to have a decent result at the 5- days is to avoid any disasters. If you finish just inside the top 50 each day, you'll probably end up 25th overall.

I think a route that went to the right of the straight line would be reasonable. But, I don't think it'd be any better than the route I took. It would also give you a little bit riskier approach to the control.

-- Michael (mike_eglinski@kcmo.org), September 12, 2000.