Route To Christmas: Day 1 2024

The 18th edition of the traditional Route to Christmas here at World of O starts with a long, interesting leg from the Italian stage race Cansiglio O-Meeting. Enjoy the challenges – just like the competitors!

Your job in Route to Christmas is to take a good look at the day’s leg, decide which route you would have chosen, and finally draw your chosen route. And optionally add a route comment (which is very helpful for the other participants). Below the route-drawing a small analysis of the leg is provided – which you are very welcome to comment on in the article comments.

And please let me know if you know about any legs which would be interesting for Route to Christmas. My slate is clean – any suggestions are welcome. Use either the comments or an e-mail to jan@kocbach.net.

Today’s leg: Day 1 2024

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is the 7th leg from the first stage of the Cansiglio O-Meeting, and we are looking at the men elite course with some quite strong runners at the start. The terrain description in Bulletin 3 says simply “Extremely fast beech forest” – but note a stony area at the start of the leg. The map also has a lot of contours.

The leg (from control 6 to 7) 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 colored according to the main routechoice alternatives.

The main challenge on this leg is to understand how much climb is involved for the different options. In addition, the extra length added by taking the road to the left must be weighted against the added orienteering challenge by taking the other route choices, and also the lower running speed in the forest, especially in the steep slopes when taking the straight routechoice alternatives.

Based on the GPS-data, running the straight alternatives (blue) seem to be the fastest, with the four fastest times being straight. However, there are many micro-routechoices when going straight. Running briefly on the road to the left and then going straight towards the open field (red) also seems quite fast, while running around on the road to the left (green) seems slower. This may partly be due to the runners taking the route to the left – the best runners taking the more straight variants. In addition, going left definitely gives more climb than going straight (at least if you find a good variant straight). Going straight it is not easy to decide exactly where to run, though – and in addition it can be tricky to relocate in case you get lost.

Below an approximate elevation profile is plotted for three different alternatives, highlighting that there is less climb for the blue alternative. Note, however, that the elevation service used here has limited accuracy and that the GPS-data also has is a bit off in some places).

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, Loggator or Livelox from 2024-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 gets interesting due to YOUR 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!