Race Winner's Route from Spiffing Ales Challenge

Posted by Grant on 23. November 2009 07:43

Here are the maps from Staffan Kallback, the overall winner from the race on Saturday; this shows his overall approach as well as his more detailed decisions. This course was "score-o" meaning each CP is worth a certain number of points, and no CPs are mandatory so you budget your time/pace in the 5 hours allotted to you. Staffan was the only one to clear the course of the "normal" checkpoints, and would've probably gotten the 4 "X" checkpoints (see the bottom of this post for more on that) if he had brought a headlamp with him. He ran out of daylight, more than he ran out of his 5 hours of time. A really impressive showing!

First off, his overview map with a general route traced on in red:


Next, his detailed orienteering map for just North of the start at the Brewery. Note his expected route in pink highlighter, and his actual route in red pen:


Next, on to the map further up the mountain. This is the famous Pfannenstiel area:


Last map from Staffan: the West edge of the course including Kusnacht canyon. Our house is very close to CP #30 on this map:


Finally, I built in an experimental section using "window orienteering" where the racers only have small fragments of the map to work with. This fragment map, combined with the blank rectangle in the Southeast corner of the overview map, were all racers would know about these 4 checkpoints. Needless to say, these were worth a lot of points -- this proved to be a very fun and challenging section for the teams that attempted them!