Route to Christmas: Day 17 2013

Todays leg in Route to Christmas is another “exotic” leg – today we travel to Belarus to a Belarussian Cup event at August 31st 2013. The chosen leg is leg number 14 in the M21E course.

This leg and terrain is just as exotic and unknown for World of O as it probably is for you – just stumbled over it in 2DRerun while browsing for interested legs for Route to Christmas. Therefore I can not tell you much about the terrain (maybe there will be some comments later on?) – but from the GPS analysis it looks like the terrain is fairly fast – even in the green. Contour interval is 5 meters.

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 have solved this leg below.

As you can see, Miha is fastest with an S-route using quite a lot of paths and roads. Surprisingly Sal is nearly as fast after taking a route with a lot of green and marsh. Note that overall, Miha is more than 10 minutes ahead of Sal – so Sal is not the faster/better runner here. I would still probably go for Miha’s alternative here – what do you think?

PS! What do you want to see more of? More “exotic” maps/places like this one where it is difficult to make any good analysis – or courses from typically Nordic terrains where there are a lot of GPS routes (e.g. GPS tracking) which make it possible to make a good analysis – but often for less exciting legs?

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.

Update

• Update 1: Just a quick update based on the comment from o-zeugs below. O-Zeugs noted that the speed in the green is approximately the same as in the white. I did only a very quick look at it (see the two figures below) – but they surely point at the green being slower than the white. The hills seems to slow down more than the green, though. This is not a detailed analysis, but it indicates that there is a difference in the green/white. To be sure here one should have looked at larger portions of the course and compared each runner internally. There is nice functionality for this in 2DRerun using the annotation feature (press “7” two times to start the annotation of segments. Afterwards press “5” to get a summary table (or “4” for another type of summary table). You can even get average running speed in each terrain type if you name the terrain type for each segment) – if somebody has time to do such an analysis for this race/leg, please send me the info and I will update the article with the results.
• Update 2: O-zeugs writes the following in the comments: “I used 2D-Rerun to the following analysis. Jan is right, that white is faster than green but that is mostly because it is Mihalkin who runs through it… Salin runs a generally lower pace. On the leg 14 he runs 4:00/km on track, 4:54/km on white, but this is only a short stretch. Taking into account all the more or less flat, white areas Salin crossed in this competition I estimate an average 4:30/km on white. Now according to the map norm, light green should correspond to a reduction of 60-80% of the running speed, in Salins case 5.6-7.4min/km, middle green should correspond to a reduction of 20-60% of the running speed, in Salins case 7.4-22 min/km. Salins speed on this leg in the light green is 4:40, in the middle green between 5:07 and 7:13 min/km.All in all, the speed reduction is not as significant as one could expect from the map. That also explains the contrast between Salins green route and the 140 routes collected above, all trying to avoid or minimize the middle green.”

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 2013-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.