World of O News
A 3200 meter long leg in Lithuania is what meets you in Route to Christmas on December 7th. The chosen leg is the 2nd leg in the H21E course from Pavasario Taure (Spring Cup) organized at April 25th 2015.
Help me! Have you got good ideas for Route to Christmas? I’d really like to get as many countries as possible into Route to Christmas – but I’m struggling to find good legs with good GPS-data/RouteGadget data/split times outside the Scandinavian countries. Any help is highly appreciated – both by me and by World of O’s readers. Send me a quick e-mail at jan@kocbach.net with your ideas!
[LAST CHANCE TO VOTE: COURSE OF THE YEAR 2015 by MIDNIGHT CET DEC 7th 2015 – prizes worth more than 2.500 Euro! VOTE HERE!]
Thanks to Vytautas Beliūnas for the tip – this is definitely an interesting leg! 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):
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. Note that there were some parts missing in the GPS-data, so the route of Salin (fastest on the leg) is continued towards the next controls in order to get the correct split times. Note also that split times are not correct on the second (GPS times), but it is enough to analyze the leg. See below for some analysis.
As you can see, going all the way to the right (Salin) seems to be the fastest option, but with the correct micro route choices on the last part of the leg you can go nearly just as fast direct. This is also the opinion of Beliunas who sent this leg as a tip. Beliunas further writes,
– More good runnes like Gvildys, Aleliunas, Krespta, Mihalkin run straigth, but lost some time while finding the optimal route. Only Dimitri Mihalkin lost only 23s, but other guys lost nearly one minute one similar routes.
Taking a look at the last part of the leg for the two fastest direct routes (see below), you can see that the trick here is to follow the faster parts of the terrain to the left in the final part of the leg, and using the path and the white areas where possible. On the right there are some green areas (possibly more than on the map) which make it tricky to move fast forward.
Comparing these two runners at the first part of the leg, Aleliunas actually seems to be the faster of them,
Finally a comparison between Salin and Mikhalkin for the part of the leg where they have different routes. Probably it is possible to run even some seconds faster direct, to manage equal time as around, but it is risky due to tricky micro routechoices, and only the very best will manage to perform well consistently on this kind of routechoice.
Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.
Navigation is more tricky than routechoice – but still you need to be careful on each leg
Analysis
Additional information
You find the complete GPS-tracking at this location.
Route to Christmas series
The Route to Christmas series at World of O has been very popular the last years – giving the readers the opportunity to do one Route Choice Challenge each day from December 1st until December 24th. If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget, GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2015-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!
