World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2021 is from the Swedish League final on Gotland this october – a tough long distance race. The leg is long – more than 2.5 km long – and this is quite far into the race (70-75 minutes after the start).
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. Here is the course setters take on the leg:
Obviously there ain’t any massive landforms to naturally split up the runners. Instead there is the micro route choices on the leg as well as not making any parallell mistakes along the route. Take also into mind that this is the last long leg on the course (approx 70-75 min running in to the course) and after a map change where the runners haven’t had lots of time calculating the leg as well as many missing the control that starts the leg (which might have been the hardest on the course). The question I had was how many dares to press on along the line and how many chickens out on the paths.
The answer is, as you can see from the below figures, quite a few. However, execution is so tricky when going straight – especially when you start getting tired, that probably more than half of the ones not choosing the path to the left, probably more, would have gained time by taking the path. However, looking at Gustav Bergman’s impressive 4:06 min/km straight, you clearly have to run really fast on the path (500 meters longer) to beat that time…
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 2021-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!
