World of O News
Today we move to the Baltics to a leg from the Baltic Championships with routes from several top stars. The chosen leg is leg number 5 in the M21E course – the race was organized at May 31st 2014.
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). Note that the contour interval is 2.5 meter – thus it is not as steep as it may look. Runnability in white terrain is medium good – around 4:40 min/km in white, flat forest for these runners who run around 3:30 on flat paths/road on this course. This is terrain where you seldom run in the marshes, but you can afford to cross them at places where they are narrow.
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. At first sight, the analysis looks very clear: Going straight is fastest – you loose time by going left/right. This is what I found when starting to prepare the leg, and partly why I chose it. Then I started to look more in detail at the routes, and as you will see below, the picture is not that clear.
Here is a comparison between Kärner (fastest, direct) and Tambasov (going right). As you can see, although Tambasov loses 18-20 seconds to Kärner – and it may look like it is because going right is too slow, the time loss for Tambasov is actually on the first part of the leg where they run nearly the same route. Tambasov’s problem is the way he handles the first hill. For the rest of the leg, going direct or right is nearly equal. Bummer.
Then let us look at the slight left route. Bertuks runs this route, and although he is a few minutes behind Kärner in the race, it looks like his speed is at least as good as Kärner’s (based on the last part of the leg where they have approximately the same routechoice). Thus, as Bertuks loses time by going right early on the leg, Bertuks’ route is clearly slower. The problem is the extra length of 100 meters without gaining much with respect to runnability.
Finally a comparison with Vaher who goes all the way to the right – running 15 meter longer than Kärner. Again Vaher has the same speed as Kärner as you can see from the first part of the leg. And again you can clearly see how Vaher loses time because it is simply too long to go all the way around when the runnability is that good on the direct route. Actually Kärner’s route is quite flat – the route of Vaher is not flatter, and there is not that much track running (and the track is less than 1 min/km faster).
So the conclusion here is: Direct and right is good. Left loses you some time. Agree?
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.
