Route to Christmas: Day 22 2011

Today’s Route to Christmas is staged in Kongsberg, Norway. This is no big competition – but rather a training event in the middle of May at the map Kjennerudvannet.

Kongsberg is a Norwegian club with many good youth runners – and several previous World Championships medalists and other top runners as trainers. They focus a lot on technical training, and their RouteGadget site is part of it. A lot of interesting maps to see there.

– One of those legs where you don’t see the perfect solution

Now over to today’s leg. We are looking at leg number 7 in the 5.4 km course at the map Kjennerudvannet. One of the runners starring here is Damien Renard – former member of the successful French National Team – you will see his route further down. The Kongsberg is very often run-straight terrain, but on this leg there is a lot of up and down along the line – it is one of those legs where you don’t really see a perfect solution at first sight. But maybe you can spot a good one anyway?

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. As you can see there are three main alternatives,

• Left using the big path (Luchsinger / Kihle) – Kihle crossing towards the middle using the path parallel to the power line.
• Direct variants – Renard and Resser taking two different direct variants. Resser takes a bit more height on his variant.
• Right – this seems like a slow variant. If you should go right, you should go all the way to the road earlier. But it is probably too long.

Luchsinger is fastest with his left alternative, but Kihle’s choice might just be the best anyway. Going right seems to be a good and safe option here anyway. What do you think? Did you run the competition?

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.