World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2021 is from a World Ranking Event Long distance taking place at the ski resort La Plagne, in an Alpine French terrain. The race was also used as a selection race for World Cup in Italy for the French team, and most of the best runners running for a selection were given a GPS.
Thanks a lot to Benjamin Leduc for the tip! Leduc writes that this race was both a technical and a physical challenge: the start was at an elevation of 2300m asl (!) and the changes between the running long routes and the detailed areas necessitated many concentration variations.
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 Leduc’s into to the analysis:
The challenge was to find the best compromise between runnability and climb, and to focus at the end to find the control in a tricky area. All of the 4 best runners of the GPS tracking had a very good physical shape, but Loïc Capbern was probably a bit faster than all the other ones.
Looking at the GPS-tracking, one can see that Capbern also runs the fastest time on the leg – his route is also characterized by being the shortest route, taking some shortcuts were others run a bit longer – except for the last part where he runs longer to save some climb and follow a path. Comparing the routes with the others (below the first two illustrations), you can see that Capbern’s running speed is not that much higher, but he does some good technical choices (out of the control, going straight instead of taking the path through the steep are, and in the last part of the leg).
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!
