Route to Christmas: Day 1 2012

The first day of Route to Christmas 2012 takes us to Hungary and the Hungarian Ultra-Long Championships. The race was organized on March 31, around 60 kms NE of Budapest. Thanks to Aron Less for tip about the route – and providing both map and routes!

We are considering the second leg in the competition – a leg which was run by several categories: M20, M21, M35, M40 and W21. The competition was organized as a mass-start competition for the categories M/W 18-21, and this leg was at around 40% of the race.

The leg is a long one in a hilly terrain – with many route choice options. In addition to the classical “over or around”-question, there are a lot of different options in between…

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):

Location

You find other maps from the area in omaps.worldofo.com here. See also latest additions in 3DRerun from this area in order to learn more about this terrain type.

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 below.

Comments

Looking at the routes taken by the runners, you can see how the quite direct route seems to be the fastest. Although it looks a lot more hilly, the route of Ferenc (16:13) has around 160 meter ascent compared to the longer detour around which still has more than 100 meters ascent.

– Even if the competition was a mass-start competition, and most of the best runners in each category chose the same route, the different categories chose different routes, Aron Less who sent in the leg explains.

– Interestingly, the W21 pack could almost run as fast as the M21 runners, who chose a more economical route (still having a lot of climbing to go in the rest of the course).

What do you think is the fastest choice?

Note that there was also a leg from the Hungarian Ultralong Championships in Route to Christmas in 2011.

Here is an overview of what WorldofO’s readers though was the best choice!

Additional information

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

HELP! Route to Christmas series

The ‘Route to Christmas’ series at World of O has been very popular the last years – and I have therefore decided to continue the series this Christmas as well. Without the help from YOU, I will not be able to dig out the best legs from the past year – so please help me!

If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget, GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2012-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.

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.