Route To Christmas: Day 13 2023

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is leg 8 in the Men Elite course from Göteborgspremiären 2023. A medium long leg in quite technical terrain.

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, there are three main alternatives – left, straight and right – and for each main variant there are a large amount of micro routechoices. Below the routes are colored according to main variant.

For this leg, it is possible to run fast both straight and around the paths to the rights, while it looks like left is slightly slower. However, when having selected your main variant, it all comes down to the micro routechoices and the execution – which is the most important for this leg. You really have to be careful when choosing where to run in the terrain (for the straight route) or which path to follow how long (for the variant to the right).

Below you can see a comparsion of the fastest straight and the fastest to the right:

The following comparison shows that straight may be run even faster, as Thrane Ødum looses some 15-20 seconds in the first part of the leg (going a bit further to the right seems to be faster, also when comparing with other runners).

This comparison shows that a S-shape – taking the path around to the right for only the last part of the leg, is definitely slower.

And finally a comparison with the route to the left.

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!