Route to Christmas: Day 13 2024

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is a long leg from the 2nd Austria Cup of the year – a long distance race in a quite hilly area between Graz and Vienna.

Thanks a lot to Martin Veitsberger for the tip – Martin has given many tips for good legs over the years! It is great to get a wide variety of terrains and countries in Route to Christmas! The leg is used in several categories. The main analysis is made for the M21E class where there are most runners, but we also take a brief look at W21E (very few runners) and M50 (varying level of runners).

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. The routes are colored according to fastest split time on the leg, with the fastest routes in green and the slowest in red.

Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.

From these visualizations it seems quite clear that going right (blue or yellow) is faster – although choice of micro routechoice and execution may be challenging going right. Looking at the W21E class, the same route is the fastest (not shown here), and the same goes for M50 (see illustration all the way at the bottom of the article). The reason the red route to the left is slower is probably because it is around 10% (220 meters) longer than going right. Thus, even if one can run faster on the red route, the extra length may be too much. It is a bit surprising, though, as there is quite some  hillside-running without paths on the blue route. Looking at the pace along the routes, it looks like although large parts of the red route can be run below 4 min/km, the running in the hillside without paths can be done quite fast (well below 6 min/km) on the blue route. What is your take on this?

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!