By: Jan Kocbach

Jan Kocbach — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 12:11:40 +0000

Sure Bob, that’s a very valid comment. Therefore, I like analyzing races with lots of runners where you can understand from a combination of all routes which option is fastest. It also helps to divide the leg into smaller parts were different runners ran the same option for part of the route and different option for other parts. It also helps looking at relative running speed in other parts of the course. For this particular leg I think there is enough information to have good faith in the conclusion (I did more comparisons than the ones shown here to make my conclusions), but in some of the other cases with fewer competitors it is more tricky (but it is still fun with bigger variety in terrains).

By: Bob Kaill

Bob Kaill — Sat, 14 Dec 2019 10:11:48 +0000

There is one major problem in most route choice analyses. Comments as to which route is the fastest are nearly always based on the assumption that all competitors have the ability to run the same speed as all the other competitors in all types of terrain. We, of course, all know that this is not true. On streamered courses where all ran the same route individuals would have very different times.
This does not mean that I think analyses are not interesting, but rather that one should be careful about the conclusions one comes to. A few years ago I did some tests where I had athletes run the same legs they had run in an earlier competition, and had them run different routes. Interesting routes but also difficult to interpret partially because, now it wasn’t a competition, they had been to the controls before and they had seen the leg earlier, etc.

Comments on: Route to Christmas: Day 11 2019

By: Jan Kocbach

By: Bob Kaill