Route to Christmas: Day 21 2013

Todays we have got a monster-leg in Route to Christmas! We return to Latvia – this one is leg 16 in the M21E course from Kurzemes Pavasaris which was organized at April 7th 2013. Thanks a lot to Janis Tamuzs for the tip!

Here is what Janis writes about the leg:
The competition is Kurzemes Pavasaris long distance in 8th of April. The conditions were very Christmas-alike. Deep snow aprx. 0.5-0.7m, still solid frozen lakes and even snowfall made this competiton unusual. The leg in question is 15-16 in men elite. It was the longest leg of the course near the end. To choose route-choice one must consider that running in snow is slow, sometimes even impossible. Roads and paths are runnable – the bigger the road, the better runability it offers. Frozen lakes and water channels also offer rather good runability because surface is even. Meadows and clearings are hell – very deep snow and uneven ground, fallen branches. Better avoid them!

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.

Janis’ analysis:

Here are the splittimes for this leg from the Top 10 of the course
1. Timo Sild total time: 1:21:53. Leg time: 21:55
2. Andris Jubelis 1:23:28. Leg time: 21:21
3. Karlis Baltacis 1:24:24. Leg time: 22:01
3. Arturs Paulins 1:24:24. Leg time: 22:33
5. Janis Tamuzs 1:27:37. Leg time: 21:56
6. Janis Krumins 1:29:29. Leg time: 22:29
7. Andris Kivlenieks 1:30:25. Leg time: 24:21
8. Lauri Sild 1:31:11. Leg time: 22:44
9. Anatolijs Tarasovs 1:32:20. Leg time: 21:57

Many good runners ran this race, and even if the competition was not very fair due to the snow, some conclusions can be made. There are not so big differences as could be assumed from the leg length, but it is clear that using the big road in the second part of the leg was the winning choice. Apparently using it only for half of the leg was better than going for it from the start of the leg.

I can add that it is quite surprising that you loose only around a minute by taking the more direct choice of Paulins (grey line).

Density map

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

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.