World of O News
Today we travel to Finland and the Finnish Championships Long for Route to Christmas. The leg in question is the first leg – right out from the start in the middle of an alpine hill.
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, going all the way to the round is clearly too slow – although the fastest going around does not lose more than 1:30. It is neither fastest to go straight like Olav Lundanes does. Instead you need to use the road and the good runnable areas as best as you can, like Fredric Portin does. Note that the split times shown here are GPS split-times and not actual split times, and they can therefore differ with 5-10 seconds or more from actual split times.
Here is a comparison of the 10 best routes. Clearly this is about not getting to eager to cut through to shorten in the middle of the leg – it is also interesting to see how Portin takes a separate route further to the left on the last part of the leg, taking the control more from the left. Here he exploits the white very runnable area.
Here is also a comparison Portin vs Lundanes:
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 is a pre-Christmas tradition at World of O – 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 2017-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!
