Route to Christmas: Day 3 2022

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2022 is from Italy! The chosen leg is the long 19th leg from the men’s class in the Italy Cup long distance race on June 5th this year – in a interesting hilly terrain. 

Thanks a lot to Samuele Tait 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, nobody tries to run straight (and take all the extra climb). A majority of the runners chose the winding road which starts straight, but then curves a bit to the left – which has 16(!) turns in and out of small valleys in the hillside. Compared to running further to the left on the big path, you also get some extra climb. Based on the GPS-data it seems like going to the left is faster, probably due to a combination of these two causes. What do you think?

Here is a comparison of the fastest runner going to the left and the fastest runner going to the right:

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, 3DRerun or Livelox from 2022-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!