World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a very interesting leg from the Swedish Championships Long distance, organized on September 15th. The chosen leg has been used both in the men and women elite course – and in both cases it is the 14th 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):
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. The first thing to note about the leg is very tempting to start running left/straight, waiting with the climb – or even going down the hill and all the way to the left. Going to the right, which seems to be the best routechoice (note that Ridefelt also goes right here; no GPS working for him here, but seconds fastest time), is far less tempting as you then start running 90 degrees on the leg direction. This is however still better: Even if you run longer, the runnability is a lot better here, and you save climb both at the first part of the leg and also again towards the control. Going to the left gets much too long – definitely not a good idea even if runnability is good. It may seem like you don’t lose that much time straight, but my estimate would be at least 30 seconds, probably more (as it is also more tricky to execute).
For the women the situation is similar. Tove Alexandersson runs the best leg time straight, but going around to the right still looks faster when you look at the average running speed of these runners compared to Alexandersson.
And finally a comparison between straight and right and straight and left.
Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (available during the day when some readers have drawn their route).
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 2019-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!
