# Intro

Course setter for this night sprint was Per Harald Havnen Johansen with Jan Kocbach (writing this analysis) involved in the course setting as a controller. With most of the Norwegian orienteering elite present just as at the night sprint, a lot of work was put into making good and interesting courses. Only the men's course is analyzed here (due to time limitations), but there are quite many interesting things to learn in the women's class as well by studying the GPS tracking.

# 1

The six first legs in the flat and fast region is kind of a warm-up ahead of the rest of the course. There is not much time to be lost, but still you have to do small choices all the way. Note that still some in the Top 20 loose more than 10 seconds on this leg.

# 2

Not a very complex leg. There is one obvious route choice, but some still tried other things. Ulf Forseth Indgaard runs very fast here.

# 3

Note how Westergård and Polden both loose 12 seconds on this quite uncomplicated leg. Nothing special to be seen on the route choices, so maybe a small mistake due to reading in another part of the course?

# 6

Short, leg with two obvious solutions (right should be the fastest). Many loose time here, probably due to preparation for the next leg. But why didn't they do that on the way to number 4?

# 7

The first real challenge of the day. The "trick" here is the small articifial boundary which makes the left choice some seconds longer. Not many see the B-option, but the ones who do are fast here. The two fastest times are run on B.

# 8

A "cheap trick" - trying to get people to run the shorter variant to the right (B) which has stairs. It looks like it might be nearly 10 seconds slower to go right - the winner Øystein Kvaal Østerbø did the wrong choice here...

# 9

Again a possibility to use the stairs (A) or get a more gradual uphill (B). Noting that you have to go down again a bit when going A, and that it is 10% longer in addition, it is quite clear B is the best option. More than 10 seconds faster based on the splits, actually!

# 10

Here the tricky part starts. It is not tempting to go up here, as you have to run 180 degrees in the wrong direction AND it is longer. However, going down (A) gives you a lot of corners to round and more down and up. Cearly faster to go up here (5-7 seconds based on the splits). Kvaal Østerbø looses time here again by going down.

# 11

This is the most tricky route choice of the day. Based on the splits, A (left) is clearly the fastest. It seems to be 5-6 seconds faster than B (middle) - which I find somewhat surprising when looking on the leg. It might be that the ones choosing A used more time to consider what to do? Note that it was also possible to take slower options, like e.g. C....

# 15

This was the second long route choice leg in the course. Here it is mostly about not doing the wrong thing (taking a lot of stairs and corners by choosing a righter variant). Quite a few runners do that mistake though, and loose 18-20 seconds... Note that there are a lot more alternatives than shown here for the leg - I have just put each runner in the most similar one.