World of O News
Todays in Route to Christmas we are bringing back fond memories from WOC in France in 2011. Not the same courses, but the same challenging terrain! Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is leg 4 in the H21E course from a regional middle distance race – O’Tomne en Savoie 2012 – at September 29th 2012.
Thanks to Mathieu Kern-Gillard for the tip – he digged out the routes in 3DRerun! (but don’t look until you have drawn your route!).
The leg (from 3 to 4 is the one of interest) 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 solved this leg below.
Comments
As you might recall from WOC 2011, this is very tricky terrain in which you typically try to keep on roads and paths as much as possible. For this leg there were two realistic options – either taking the path to the right or taking the road to the left. After running a few legs in this terrain, it is very tempting for many to seek out to the big path/road in order to be able to rest your head a bit. However, on this particular leg it seems like going left makes your last part of the leg more tricky – with less clear attackpoints – and that is the main reason for taking the rightmost routechoice. Also, the path going to the right is not much worse than the one going to the left.
It is not possible to get a 100% clear conclusion from the GPS-routes, as the best runners took the rightmost choice – there is no really good runner going left to compare with. However, based on the GPS-data, it looks like right is the better choice. Also the fact that most of the good runners (who are familiar with this terrain type) choose the rightmost route is an indication.
What would you do?
Additional information
You find the complete map in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.
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. 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.
