Route To Christmas: Day 22 2023

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2023 is another leg from the Junior World Championships 2023 – a course which is also in the Top 12 in the Course of the Year 2023 after a few days of voting. Thanks a lot to Iounut Zinca  for the tip!

Take a look at the leg from Day 16 in Route to Christmas 2023 to familiarize yourself with the terrain type.

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 route choices have been chosen – here the routes are colored according to variant:

And here the main 7 variants are shown with the fastest runner on each variant (although a lot of other, slower variants are run in addition):

Four main variants are chosen that are relatively fast – the blue, red, green and purple variants. The blue variant, exploiting the path network to the right seems to be the fastest route here – and is also chosen by many runners. There are many places to take a wrong path here, so execution is also very important. The second fastest variant seems to be the red variant slightly to the left, where also some paths are exploited – whereas the two other mentioned variants go further to the left and are longer.

Iounut Zinca gave the tip to include this leg on Facebook, and did then also post an overview of different alternatives on this leg, including length and climb (see below). As you can see, the fast route to the right has the least climb while being among the shortest variants (except straight, but here there is a lot less path running).

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!