Route to Christmas: Day 13 2019

In today’s Route to Christmas we travel to Estonia and the Baltic Championships Long distance, organized in the WOC 2017 long distance terrain. This race was organized in spring time, with the runnability being much better than at WOC in the middle of summer.

Thanks a lot to Tõnis Laugesaar for the tip! Laugesaar writes the following about the race:  I suggest the Baltic Championships in long distance, in the end of May. The competition was held in the same area as the WOC long distance in 2017. Due to the season (end of spring), the runnability  was much better than in WOC because of the low undergrowth. Back in 2017 summer it was a total jungel!

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, it was definitely a lot faster to go around to the left on the road. The extra length (3.7 km vs 2.9 km straight) is worth it for the better runnability. Actually Salin who runs to the left has average running time on this leg of 4:05 min/km whereas Gvildys running straight has 6:13 min/km and Timo Sild running straight (but some more path running) has 5:58 min/km.

Here another illustration where you see clearly that all the fastest times have been ran around to the left:

The first uphill straight is really tough, slowing Gvildys down a lot:

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!