World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a very complex leg from the World Military Championships Long distance organized in Finland. The leg in question is the first leg, where the runners were thrown into an interesting routechoice problem.
Thanks to regular reader “Color converter” for another excellent 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 (note that split times are based on GPS and not official split times). As you can see, this legs offers two main choices; going left or going around. However, in addition to these two main choices, there are a number of micro routechoices on the straight route – and there are also different options for the first third of the leg (both if you go straight and if you go left) and for the last part if you go left. This makes the leg really complex, so we’ll look into the details more further down.
First consider the six fastest routes. As you can see, four of these go to the left while two go straight. Thus, this is a leg where most runners will probably benefit from running around (due to the technical difficulties straight – so many microroutechoices must be made right in order to run a good time here) – but it is possible to run just as fast straight as around.
As you can see, several routechoices cross each other – thus ehe leg gets really interesting when we look at the differents parts of the leg. Let us first look at the first part until the point where the ones running straight need to continue straight. As you can see, Kowalski runs significantly faster than the others by going around to the right – and also several good times are run around to the right here. Thus, the ones running straight could have earned some time by first running right – and then the direct choice could have been even faster.
Looking further to a point further to the left, going around to the right is still faster, but the time differences are smaller now.
Finally, looking at the last part of the leg for the around-route, both main alternatives are nearly equal – not how Leonid Novikov runs fast by taking the control through the white, a bit from the back.
Finally some comparisons highlighting the comments above:
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!
