World of O News
We have saved the best for last: Today’s Route to Christmas takes us to Sandstone terrain in the Czech Republic. We’ve got a fantastic course with a lot of route choice legs – and a short analysis by Czech National Team trainer Radek Novotny, who was also the course setter.
– I have used the same legs for a czech team training race and for the Varsity match (Oxford/Cambridge) one week later, Novotny comments about the course.
– 3 km more on the course in total
And when you take a look at the routes below, it is actually quite interesting to see the difference in route choice between the Czech runners and the British runners.
– Among the Czechs, we have got incredibly interesting comparison, especially between Smola and Sedivy – despite almost the same time in the finnish, they have chosen a totally different tactic. Smola ran mostly straight, while Sedivy took mostly the detours, having run 3 km more on the course in total!
There are several interesting legs in this course. We start with the first one today, and take two more legs as bonus legs the next two days.
The first leg we consider is the leg from control 4 to control 5 (right to left below). 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. Looking at the Czech runners (first illustration below), you see that the three fastest times are on the direct variant, with Dlabaja running the fastest time.
The analysis by Novotny:
– Straight was best here. We had also Pavel Kubat running the right alternative, where he did 8:00 (check the Hj class, they had same course and Kubat ran excellently on the day).
Looking at the Varsity match runners, it is interesting to note that none of them took the direct route. Note also that one runner takes the right variant (down and up again) which none of the top Czech runners took – only loosing around 20 seconds to the best time. The Czech runners are however nearly two minutes faster.
As a sidenote: Novotny offers training camps in this sandstone area through the webpage sandstones.cz – I have been there several times for Prague Easter and training camps, and the terrain type is one of my favourites.
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.
