Route to Christmas: Day 20 2017

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from one of the Swiss Testrace X, organized in one of those green Swiss forests where you have got to fight hard in the green forest and run really fast when you are on a path or road.

Thanks to regular reader “Color converter” for the excellent tip. Color converter writes about the leg: – One of the top guys suggested this one as a surprisingly good course for “Swiss Mittelland terrain”. As often in “Mittelland terrain”, the runability is pretty bad in green areas, and even worse on areas with undergrowth. Usually those steep valleys are super steep and probably a bit slippery to get out of again. Also there are always many paths. To combine them as well as possible is often the key.

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, a large number of different routes have been run – and several runners lose significant time here. The two key points here are (1) to not try to cross the valley just after the control – here you’ll lose valuable time and (2) to not run too far around to either left or right – a quite straight route is optimal after rounding the valley- although several straight options work well. Note that split times provided are based on GPS-time and not on actual split times. However, the time differences are so big between the alternatives that the analysis should be valid also for the official split times.

Here you see the six fastest routes – all are different straight variants:

And here you see all routes color-coded – the purple (around left), green (crossing valley, then straight) and yellow (crossing valley and then right) are clearly slower.

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!