World of O News
A long leg where no solution feels like a really good solution – that’s the type of leg we have chosen for the last day of the 2016 edition of Route to Christmas. The 3 km long leg is from Finland, from the Finnish WOC selection race Long, organized at June 26th. Thanks to Jarmo Tonder for the tip.
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.
As you can see, the best choice is to take the road around – even if running 4.1 km is 37%(!) longer than going straight along the line. The reason for why you can run as much as 37% longer on this 3000 meter long leg and still earn time, is that the “straight” options is not at all straight. The best “straight” runner is Asko Asikainen, and he runs more than 3.7 km – thus he runs a lot longer than just along the line. Many runners lose a lot of time on this leg, making it tricky to understand the leg. The below illustration shows only the 14 fastest on the leg, showing more clearly that going left on the road is clearly the fastest. The straight-right variant of Asikainen can be run fairly fast, but runners choosing the other options lose significantly.
Here also a comparison between the best around to the left and the best straight:
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 – 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 2016-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!
