Route to Christmas: Day 24 2014

Todays leg in Route to Christmas is from France – and as this is the last day of this year’s Route to Christmas we let the women take the center of the stage. The chosen leg is leg 4 in the W21E course from a National French/Swiss race in the Jura mountains – organized at June 1st 2014.

Thanks a lot to Jurg Niggli for the tip! This was a great course with some interesting route choices – especially this long leg to number 4. 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). The terrain is very interesting technically. Runnability is not the best in the white – quite stony – and not too easy to maintain a direct compass course. For route choices on long legs, you would like to use the paths (and then especially the larger paths) as much as possible – but you also need to cut through at some places to not run too far. So as always: All about compromises. And finally, remember that this is tricky terrain. More than everything, make sure you have a good solution for the last 100 meters to be sure you find the control without mistakes within the control circle.

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. On first it looks like “retired” Simone Niggli simply runs a lot faster than everybody – she was after all around 10 minutes faster than the other GPS-runners (Note that Niggli’s GPS was retired for the first part of the leg, but that doesn’t influence the analysis). Looking a bit closer at it, you note that Sarina Jenzer’s route was actually nearly as fast as Niggli’s. Jenzer loses nearly 1:30 to Wyder on the last 500 meters of the leg; first she does not find the path, then she stops ahead of the control. Thus going right and taking Niggli’s route are equivalent – left might even be better if you manage to run it well. Also taking a closer look at the ones running left, you can see that e.g. Lüscher seems to lose several minutes on bad micro routechoices. Thus this proves what is the case in this type of terrain: The most important thing is not to choose the fastest route choice, but to run your choice well!

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.