World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a course from the women elite class of the Czech Champs Long distance. This is a leg in a typical continental terrain (we already had a leg from the men’s class here earlier).
The question is the same as often in this type of continental terrain: Climb the hills or run around? 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, running straight is the fastest alternative, with some 15-20 seconds slower to run around to the left (note that all split times are GPS-based splits, so actual times may vary with some seconds; not enough to change the overall picture though). Interestingly white a few runners choose to run either right – losing significant time or a bigger S trying to save some climb but instead losing some time. The interesting part here is to look at why straight is faster. The last of the three map samples below is probably the best to look at to try to understand that, so let’s move down there.
Below the fastest straight and left route is compared. As you can see the difference is only calculate to 11 seconds on the central part of the leg. So what is the difference for the two routes? The route to the left is 250 meters longer, but you save around 20-25 meters of climb over the top on the straight route. However, the straight route gives you the climb a without being that steep, on the left you have to crawl up a very steep hill. You could avoid it with a bit more S-shape, but that would get too long. Probably the stronger men would be able to get up that steep hill faster, and thus the left route would be just as fast as the straight for the men (Edit: Checking out Milos’ analysis from the same leg in the men’s course shows that left was fastest in the men’s, but nobody chose the good straight route of Indrakova; so straight and left are probably quite equal).
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!
