World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2021 is another quite long leg in Nordic terrain – this time from the Norwegian Championships long distance which was organized close to Porsgrunn in eastern Norway.
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. There is one runner trying to ruin the analysis here, and that is Kasper Fosser who takes a route to the right (where everybody else is slower), but still runs the fastest time of the ones with GPS-data. He does, however, take a small extra S-curve to use the path for some meters and then runs further to the right than the bunch on the rest of the leg, but the reason he can run so fast on the route to the right is still probably his running speed. Based on the GPS-data, it looks quite clear that the fastest route for normal runners is to run around to the left, following the route of Magne Dæhli and Lukas Liland. Here you follow the paths as much as possible, you get some flat, quite fast running, and you work with the terrain instead of against it. It is a bit longer, but comparing with Fosser’s S-shaped route it is only 100 meters extra (around 7%).
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!
My preferred route-choice is to run like MD in the start but then cut over the felled area close to the line into KHF’s route-choice. This is shorter and probably a bit faster for the first part of the leg. I would go closer to the line in the last 50% of the leg, than KHF too, which would also save you some distance without significantly increasing the climb. But I agree that the route choice of e.g. LL is both easier to execute well and probably saves you some energy, so this is a good choice for an early long leg during a long distance race, too.