Route to Christmas: Day 22 2018

There are some legs where it seems impossible to find any really good solution, where you have to choose between several tricky and tough options. Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is one of those – a long leg from the District Champs Long for the Stockholm area in Sweden.

Thanks a lot to both Simon Hector and Gustav Bergman for the tip about the leg – definitely a nice one!  As Hector puts it: – The terrain south of Stockholm has small but steep hills which can make it interesting for long legs like this one. It was difficult to get this leg in hand directly from the start, so you needed to calm down and take your time to make a plan.

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).

This is definitely one where you need to think about where to go so that you don’t end up in an area with bad runnability. Also, it needs precise navigation all the way, it’s not the kind of terrain where you can fix it in the end of the leg (Simon Hector)

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. Again from Hector: – In this race, Gustav was totally outstanding and he showed that already to the first control! His speed was simply higher than everyone else’s. He really loves competing in Stockholm terrain and was in great shape one week ahead of his first World Cup victory.

Looking at all routes colored by time, it all looks very complex, partly because many runners do mistakes when approaching the control. Thus the map further down with a color for each options makes it a bit easier to understand what is happening.

Here you can see how Bergman is clearly faster with a blue left-right option, whereas most of the others succeeding on the leg run to the right, except for Ruslan Glebov who runs fast with a very direct option. Based on the more detailed analysis (see further below), Bergman’s route and a good version of the rightmost (red) route is probably close to equivalent time-wise, but Bergman simply had higher speed than the others on this day. Comparing Bergman and Glebov,  Bergman takes better passages and thus goes faster, which is very important in this kind of terrain. Ruslan loses time by getting too many small climbs and not really hitting the best passages as Gustav does.

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!