Discussion: This guy is nuts

But you have to respect the effort…. https://youtu.be/qQleYkp40eo

Nuts by expecting to make money from a YouTube posting? Or nuts with pleasure after we all click on that link and start the money trickling his way?
I got half way through it. Did he make it?

That was cool. It's funny to think that we can totally relate to it, but that non-orienteers probably cannot even remotely fathom how one could do that (navigate/run totally off trail, in a straight line, for 21 km). When he mentioned his need to finish by 3:00; I almost expected it to be because the public bus would be coming down the road then. But the real reason was equally Scandinavian.

I don't know if I'd say it was a 'perfect' straight line, I definitely saw him going around a tree.

He has a freakishly big head.

Did he do this alone, with just a camera on a stick that could be edited out later? (I thought I saw its shadow, briefly, just after crossing the "big" river)

Yes my wife says the '360 camera on a stick' (go-pro max or insta 360) edits out the stick automatically and it definitely looks like he's holding something at all times. I mean, not the map and compass.

Selfie stick in his right hand except when he swam across the river, when he stuck it in his backpack.

Unless the stick had an easily adjustable length, there was a lot of variation in zoom, which probably resulted in the the "big head" effect. I recall a short bit when all the presumably straight trees behind him seemed to bend toward the center of the image.

I chuckled at the transcription of "orienteering" as "were in tearing" at 1:48. Or maybe he actually felt like having a good cry after going through icy water.

Straight line challenges seem to be a thing on YouTube recently. The Storror parkour group did a marathon straight line challenge set by a YouTuber called geowizard. That one was a lot more brutal, with climbing over things, sneaking through private property including some quarries, going through lots of thorny brush, and taking two long days.

I defintily want to do this myself, seems like too much fun.

Agree, this looks like a perfectly fun project.

...if only we had large maps like his easily available over here.

This one was done on a country-size mapant map, but there has previously been challenges trying to find the longest possible straight route on one or more proper ISOM orienteering maps. I.e. a couple of club mates ran 30+ km SE of Oslo, with a single ~50+m excursion to a culvert/bridge where they could legally cross underneath a railroad line. (Via my wife I was able to contact the railroad control room operators to get the particular line to be designated "drive slowly, visual stopping distance" for a short period, but the runners decided to find a legal way that didn't hold up any trains.)

I think would run a perfect circle instead. They say you star going circles when you get lost, so it would be sort of perfecting that.

it's also a lot harder to hold a perfect curve than a perfect straight line

Largest possible circle within an existing ISOM map?

This is most impressive!

Now if your circle happened to be centered on a magnetic pole...

watched him since 2016, Goran does God's work. Don't disrespect the forehead buddy

@engineerexplore: I've been working on the https://confluence.org/ project for 20+ years, my dream trip would take me to the South pole, then with a snowmobile (or two for backup/security) drive 111.111 km due north along the 0 degree line, getting to 89S 0W. From that point I'd go directly east for 698.1316 km, stopping every degree /1.939 km and take photos in all directions. From my one long snowmobile confluence trip on Svalbard (https://confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=8135) I've calculated that this trip would take somewhere between 10 and 20 hours for the driving, plus about 5 min per stop (adding 30 more hours!) for a total of 40-60 hours which means I'd need several days just to get on top of the list for the most confluences visited.
It would probably make sense to use a 360 degree camera on a pole, taking video along the trip and extract individual photos during post-processing?

Terje, I've been hoping for several years now to put on an event called Circus Maximus, where the goal is to enclose the most land area within a certain time limit. Looking for the right terrain :-)

@ericjr77 Leo Tolstoy beat you to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Land_Does_a...

Andrew Lee, i found the YouTube videos you mentioned. Fun stuff. On the second one, at 39:00, they get a warning, if they continue on that straight line: "You Die"

video 1

video 2