January Classics: Day 2

Another classic WOC Long distance race today – the WOC long distance in Scotland in 1999. The map with course is found at the O-zeugs webpage.

A PDF-booklet with the route choices of the top finishers and some history about the race can be found here (found in this thread at Nopesport). Here are some lines from the PDF:

Described by men’s champion Bjørnar Valstad of Norway as “A perfect day on a perfect course” and women’s champion Kirsi Bostrom of Finland similarly as “A perfect day, I still felt strong at the river crossing and ran hard, I made a small mistake at No.15, otherwise a wonderful run.”

While Norway, Sweden and Switzerland dominated the top 10 of the men’s results, Norway taking an astonishing five of the top eight places, Britain’s hopes rested on Steve Hale, Jon Duncan and Jamie Stevenson. While all three claimed personal best results on the day, Steve Hale was left disappointed with his run, saying “this year, with home advantage, I really felt I could do it. Bjørnar Valstad was in a class of his own, but the split times show I was in the hunt for second place at least up to half way. But then I started to lose it. You don’t get many chances like this in a career…”

• Mens course

Selected leg: Leg 4-5

Unfortunately a route choice is drawn on the map, but it is still interesting to take a look at one of the legs – leg 4-5. What would you do on this leg?

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.

Comments

No big analysis today – but based on the PDF-booklet it looks like Bjørnar Valstad has the fastest split here by taking a similar route choice to the one drawn on the map – i.e. not going down on the road.

Update from the comments (by o-zeugs):

Some notes: On the map you see the route of Christoph Plattner who became 10th. He ran the leg in 8:51, 24th split time. Best split had Björnar Valstad 7:30, 2nd Kenneth Cederberg 7:52, 3rd Yuri Omelchenko 7:54, 4th Johan Ivarsson 8:01. Plattners notes indicate that going more direct on the first part would be faster. It is not obvious on first sight but towards north the forest is bordering open land. This leg looks quite different today

• Full results
• Splits/PackFigures via O-Zeugs