Route to Christmas: Day 13 2010

This very long leg from the Hungarian Sprint Championships has deserved its spot in the 2010 edition of Route to Christmas due to the many different route choice options and the complexity in finding the best route. The leg was suggested by the controller for the event – Aron Less. The event was held on September 4th in Salgótarján – and the 9th leg in the men’s a-final is the chosen leg. As many as 15 of the 24 starters have drawn their routes!

Thanks a lot to Aron Less for the tip – and also for providing his own analysis of the leg (see below). He also test-ran the route-choices on this particular leg. Course setter for the event – and the man behind this leg – was Dániel Pelyhe.

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):

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 who have drawn their route choice solved this leg:

Then take a look at the analysis provided by Aron Less. As you can see both the splits of the runners and Less’s analysis confirms that the leftmost option is the best – and actually by as much as 30 seconds. The reason for this is that you avoid map-reading as it is technically very easy (make it easy), you avoid big turns (run straight lines), you avoid most of the climbing and all climbs are runnable.

Finally, here is a density map showing which route was most popular among the ones drawing their route in the Webroute above. The version shown here is generated at December 13th 07:30 CET based on the first 17 people drawing their route – it will be updated this evening when more people have drawn their suggested routes (and thus be more informative then). This is the updated version with around 170 routes. As you can see, most have chosen the optimal route (did you cheat?) – except for the very first part of the leg.

Complete map in Omaps.worldofo.com

You find the complete map and Routegadget info in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Omaps.worldofo.com

The ‘Route to Christmas’ series at World of O was very popular the last years – and I’ve therefore decided to continue the series this Christmas as well. If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget from 2010-competitions – or old forgotten ones which are still interesting – please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll include it in Route to Christmas if it looks good. Route to Christmas will not be interesting if YOU don’t contribute.

There will be no analysis about the best routechoice for each leg – you can provide that yourself in the comments or in the Webroute. 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!

Note that there may be some errors in the Routegadget data (sometimes somebody draws a route for another runner just for fun). Please add a comment below if you spot en error.