Route to Christmas: Day 11 2011

In today’s edition of Route to Christmas we visit Hungary for another long leg in an ultralong event – although the leg is not as long as the Finnish one of yesterday. The leg is from the Men 21 Elite course in the Hungarian Ultralong Championships organized on April 4th.

Updated with comment from Aron: As it was the beginning of April, leaves were still not yet out, visibility and runnability were both excellent. The hillsides in these mountains are generally very steep and most of the runners experienced this leg after 100 minutes of running and probably about an hour still to go.

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.

The event was the Hungarian Ultralong Championships. As it was the beginning of April, leaves were still not yet out, visibility and runnability were both excellent. But the hillsides in these mountains are generally very steep and most of the runners experienced this leg after 100 minutes of running and probably about an hour still to go.

Then you can take a look at how the runners who have drawn their route choice solved this leg. As you can see, there are three distinct choices chosen by the runners.

• A left variant – run by three runners, 21:23, 22:43 for the two fastest of them
• A right variant – run by two runners, 21:17-22:04
• A more direct variant – run by the fastest runner on this leg – Zsolt Lenkei, 17.41

Lenkei is a lot faster than the other runners on the complete course as well, thus it is not easy to draw any conclusions from the splits here. The direct variant does look shorter, without much more altitude to be taken. It looks a bit slow in the steep hillside at the last part of the leg though, but probably steep hillsides are not too bad in this kind of terrain.

Aron writes in his comment: Probably a few runners took more defensive route-choices just to avoid cramping later on.

Do you know anything about this event? Please add a comment – this is one of the events I have little knowledge about. If no comments are given, we’ll have to rely on the o-community’s drawing of routes…

BTW: This is an area with a lot of interesting maps. If you have got a rainy Sunday today, take a look at some of the other maps in the area here.

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 has been 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 2011-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.