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Route to Christmas: Day 12 2014

Today we have got a great leg from Slovenia in early spring – with several world class runners participating. The race is Lipicia Open, the terrain is both hilly and stony – and you have got several paths of various size to choose from. The leg in question is the 14th leg from the M21E course.

Thanks to Matija Razum for the tip! The course is set by Radek Novotny – the Czech national team coach. The reason for all the stars on the start line is that Czech Republic and Norway had training camps in Slovenia in this period.

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). To tell you a bit about the runnability here, in Thomas Natvig Årstad’s Doma archive you can read that “I got a shock towards the first control due to all the stones”. The rest of the area is not that stony, but still remember this karst area which makes the forest quite slow in areas which are dotted with small, black dots. Except for that, remember the usual: First find out what is up and down – and approximately how much you have to go up and down – is going far around to save climb an alternative? Then find out which routes have a high risk of significant time loss, and take them out of the considerations. Finally choose between the (few) alternatives you have left. And if you have time, provide a few words about why you took your choice.

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, Lundanes ran the best time by not going all the way to the bottom, but instead staying in the hillside. However, looking at all the routes and the total times, it may look like Lundanes should have been a bit faster than the others on this leg. Thus going down and up again is probably faster. The reason for losing time on Lundanes’ route can be seen in the illustration at the bottom. Lundanes has several areas where he is quite slow – and there is also more up and down on this route thank you see at first sight. It is not always easy to run fast in a hillside on small paths.


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 2014-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.

About Jan Kocbach

Jan Kocbach is the founder of WorldofO.com - taking care of everything from site development to writing articles, photography and analysis.

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