World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a leg from the “Sprint course of the year 2018″, the Junior World Championships Sprint in Hungary. Both men (leg 6) and women (leg 5) had the chosen 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). The leg in itself is not too long, but it is quite complex…
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 (first men, then women). As you can see, running in a right-left-right-left curve is clearly the fastest for both men – and this “double S” along with the complexity of the terrain in this area is probably the reason why so many athletes took the wrong route here. Note that only the best athletes ran with a GPS-tracker, so for athletes further down on the results there are probably even more choosing a non-optimal route here.
When we color each alternative with a separate color, it is easier to understand exactly how much you lose by taking the wrong route. For the men it may look like it is only 3 seconds (Fosser loses three seconds on the red route), but he was the fastest runner in this race, so realistically it is more. The green route which many top runners took loses you significantly more time – 10-12 seconds or more. Two of the runners in the fight for medals lost 13 and 15 seconds here. In the women’s class it looks like time losses for non-optimal route is more like 8-10 seconds for the slightly left route, and similar to the men for going all the way around to the left.
This was only one of the interesting and decisive legs in this course – see the article about the race here to get more insight into this interesting course. Here is a comparison of the top runners in the men’s leg on this leg. The analysis article comments the leg as follows: “Suter and Svensk take the wrong route to the left and lose 13 and 15 seconds. Kaarlo alsos loses significant time here. Kolbe and Fosser are the only two of the top runners who execute this leg well.”
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 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 GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2018-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!
