Route to Christmas: Day 4 2020

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2020 is a long and interesting leg from the Swedish Championships Long distance. Thanks a lot to Jonas Wäfler for the tip!

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, the majority of the runners chose to run various straight variants, but going around to the right on the big path as Martin Regborn did proved to be fastest. The five fastest times are run on a route around to the right, while Max Peter Bejmer is the fastest runner running straight.

Here the routes are colored according to chosen route. The S-shaped route of Gustav Bergman (green below) is quite interesting, as is shown further below.

Here the route of Regborn (fastest right) and Bejmer (fastest straight) is compared, including pace on selected segments. Regborn can run a pace between 3:25 and 4:00 min/km on most of the leg on the path, while Bejmer struggles getting below 5:30 min/km in the terrain. Especially the middle part is slow.

Looking at Gustav Bergman, it is interesting to see that he earns 41 seconds on the first part of the S-curve to Bejmer, which is exactly the time he is behind Regborn. Thus Bergman would have matched the time of Regborn or even have been running faster with an optimal straight route (i.e. his route on the first half of the leg and the route of Bejmer on the last half of the leg), but on the other hand Bergman had the highest speed on this day.  Also, the risk going right on the path is significantly lower.

Jesper Svensk chose another route straight, but this is not faster.

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 2020-competitions, or old forgotten ones which are still interesting, please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll consider including 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!