Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is a very interesting long leg from the Czech Championships Long distance – a course that came to my attention after being nominated for Course of the Year 2023.
The course has several interesting legs where I struggled to find a solution I was really happy with – one of them is the leg to control 7. Several athletes took a slower route choice here – for example one of the best Czech athletes – Milos Nykodym – lost 3 minutes by taking a wrong route. Can you find the fastest route?
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, a fairly straight route which takes you through some green early on the leg is the fastest – and more than half of the field spotted this route. Going around to the left or right may seem very tempting though, but that gives you a timeloss of several minutes.
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!