Route to Christmas: Day 23 2018

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is an interesting sprint leg from Euromeeting in Denmark in September. With the first ever Sprint WOC coming up in Denmark in 2020, there was big interest for the sprint-focused Euromeeting this year, with many top runners on the start.

Thanks to Johan Aagaard for the tip (always several tips from Aagaard for Route to Christmas – that is highly appreciated!). 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 there is a wide spread in routechoices on this leg, and a relatively large percentage of the runners take a wrong choice. Let’s take a look at why. Clearly going to the right is faster than going to the left, and Tim Robertson’s route to the right is the shortest of the variants to the right (cutting some corners), and also the fastest.

Here are three different variants shown with lengths. See how the green to the left is kind of tempting due to the way the leg is drawn; it feels natural to run to the left instead of running nearly backwards out of the control to the right. But looking at where control 12 is placed, you need to attach the control from the right, and lose valuable time running around the fence/house towards the control if you choose one of the routes to the left. Also, on the route to the left you have to run quite long 90 degree to the line towards the control. Definitely a nicely balanced leg from the course setter (there were also many other nice legs on this course, BTW).

Looking more in detail at the different options with the fastest on each option:

And finally all routes colored by option; see how dominant the routes to the right are – and how many choose other variants:

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!