Comments on: Route to Christmas: Day 10 2019

By: Ole Petter Aasrum

Ole Petter Aasrum — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 15:30:41 +0000

Many courses had similar leg, with slightly different starting points. This gave some new challenges, and maybe some new opportuities. Take a look at Livelox. All the courses are archived there.

Course setter
Ole Petter Aasrum

https://www.livelox.com/Events/Show/40285
https://www.livelox.com/Events/Show/40286

By: Jan Kocbach

Jan Kocbach — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 21:41:37 +0000

Thanks a lot for the comment, always nice with comments from somebody who has actually been involved in the course setting.

By: Knut Wiig Mathisen

Knut Wiig Mathisen — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 21:38:23 +0000

I was technical delegate or course controller for this event, working with course setter Ole Petter Aasrum, thank you for including the leg in your famous Route to Christmas Series. We wanted also the women to experience a course with interesting and challenging long legs. This leg particularly we wanted the route-choices to be largely on road and path since the rest of the terrain is really tough and quite slow. The middle route is the fastest and this can be seen from the map, but perhaps only after close inspection? The main reason is simply distance, on all three main route-choices you end up running down and coming close to the Farris lake and get some significant climb from there to the control. The running speed difference between the top 10-20 competitors in W21E often is really significant and it is difficult to compare legs times directly. Some runners run quite fast on road, but less fast compared to the best in the terrain etc.
My favorite route-choice is to go directly south from the control running in the white forest and then using Eirin’s route-choice, it is easier to execute optimally then cutting through the green in the start as Elena is doing, safer and you get time to prepare the rest of the course. Left is probably 30-40 s slower whereas right is 50-60 s slower.

By: Terje Wiig Mathisen

Terje Wiig Mathisen — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 07:11:54 +0000

As Jan notes I ran this event, our ending control was a bit closer so it seemed quite obvious that the middle S curve would be the fastest, i.e. far left was mostly out of the question, and so was far right due to a starting point further south. The only thing I disliked about this route choice was the fact that the route which Elena Roos took on the first part turned out to be significantly faster than shown on the map.

I am guessing that after a (large?) number of runners had passed through the green it became significantly faster than shown!