World of O News
In today’s edition of Route to Christmas 2022 we travel to interesting, alpine terrain in Switzerland. The chosen leg is the 16th leg on the men’s course at the World Cup final long distance in the Davos-Klosters region, at high altitude between 1500 and 2000 masl. Thanks to Arild Andersen for the tip!
The men’s long distance was suprisingly tight, with many changes in the top during the race both due to route choices and mistakes. Daniel Hubmann was quite far down on the results in the first part of the course, but secured the victory with strong long legs to control 16 and control 29 – and a very strong finish. The chosen leg today is leg 16 – with good opportunity to lose time if you don’t take the fastest choice.
The terrain was described as follows ahead of the race: “Alpine terrain with steep slopes varying with a lot of contour details, stones and cliffs at 1500- 1900 m above sea level. Moderate to steep slopes. Detailed contours vary with slopes with poor details. Alpine, open forest, meadows and grassland. Good to very good runability with some undergrowth and stony parts.”
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.
A lot of different options were chosen on this leg, as you can see above. From the GPS-data it looks quite clear that taking a routechoice to the right, i.e. climbing up to the path system above the forbidden area and taking the control from above, will gain you time. Running to the left is probably slower mostly due to it being longer. There are also several options to the right; here it seems like it is advantageous to take the climb gradually in less steep terrain (as very often is the case), and take the climb on road/path were possible. Also, going up to the road too early means you have to follow it down again.
Below routes are colored by variants, with the 6 fastest being blue (to the right). Note that the fastest route to the left is only around half a minute slower than running to the right, so it is possible to run quite fast to the left as well.
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!
