Route to Christmas: Day 14 2014

We have visited WOC 2014 and WOC 2016 terrain in this Route to Christmas – now we travel to some WOC 2015 relevant terrain, “Balmoral – Race the Castles”.  The chosen leg is the first leg in the M21E course – and the race was organized October 18th 2014.

This event was suggested by three different people; Murray Strain, Alexander Chepelin and Halden SK. Different legs/classes were suggested, and even if my conclusion is that there are not very big route choice differences in this terrain/course, I decided to include a leg from Balmoral in this Route to Christmas.

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). This is a leg with significant climb – and there are also options to mostly run in the terrain, use paths of varying size or use the road. What is your thought behind the 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. The quick analysis is that direct or right is fast – left is slow. Although direct and right look equal here, a more detailed analysis (see below) may indicate that going Bobach’s route to the right is actually faster as Bobach loses some time into the control.   The reason for left being slower (see comparison Lundanes vs Hubmann further down) seems to be that running speed on the left route is simply not significantly higher than the more direct route – and therefore the extra running length costs too much time. The fact that Bobach’s route is so competitive indicates that the green is not too bad to run in.

To go even further left is even slower, as you here need to run even longer without gaining that much with respect to runnability.

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.

Bonus

A small bonus. Two of the legs suggested by Alexander Chepelin in the women’s course:

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.