World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is the 7th leg in the Men’s class in the Swedish Championships Long distance.
Thanks a lot to Björn Johansson for the tip! And as a reminder – I still need tips for interesting legs for Route to Christmas. You are especially encouraged to suggest legs from the women’s class as most tips so far have been for legs in the men’s class.
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.
And also the usual alternative version with different colors for the different alternatives:
Based on the GPS-data, it looks like runners have managed good times on three different alternatives. Regborn is fastest with a slight curve to the left, while Hector loses around 15 seconds by running a bit more straight the first part of the leg. Comparing Regborn and Hector, though (see below), indicates that the reason for Regborn’s route being faster is higher running speed, while the left variant of Hector the first part of the leg is actually faster. Going all the way around might also be an excellent choice. You find the same leg with more athletes in Livelox (but as the map is blocked for download, I could not make the analysis based on the Livelox-data).
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 2023-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!
One interesting aspect is that the overall winner, Viktor Svensk, was the only one who chose the road far to the right. Did he save energy here for the last part of the course?