World of O News
Today’s Route to Christmas takes another trip to Finland and the Finnish Championships long distance. This time we look at the 5th leg – also a tip by Anssi Vesanto.
In preparation for this leg it could be a good idea to visit day 6 to look at how the routechoice challenges are solved in this type of terrain. And a small reminder: With fewer international competitions this year, there are fewer interesting legs to be found for Route to Christmas, so please help with interesting legs as Vesanto and several others have.
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.
Did you dare to go straight here? If you did, you would be one of very few, and definitely lose time on it. Below you can take a look at how the runners have solved this leg. As you can see, the main choice here is to run left or right, using roads/paths as much as possible.
The fastest route is run to the left (blue) by Ojanaho, with Kirmula to the right (red) running at nearly the same time (these are GPS-times, so they may be off by some seconds). It does, however, look like Kirmula has somewhat higher running speed on the road than Ojanaho, with Kirmula running 3:15 – 3:20 min/km on the road.
Based on the GPS-data of all runners, probably Ojanaho’s route to the left is fastest as 3 of the four fastest athletes ran a blue choice, followed by the green choice of Pernu (right and then towards the middle; the three next on the list run green, and you can also see this from the autOanalysis between Pernu and Kirmula below; more road-running and less green striped areas). While Kirmula’s choice at the last part of the leg is a bit slower, on the other hand Kirmula finds a very good micro-routechoice at the first part of the leg, this is were he beats almost everybody by running more straight over the hilltops and avoiding marshes.
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!
