World of O News
In today’s edition of Route to Christmas 2024 we travel to New Zealand to a very interesting leg in steep terrain. Thanks a lot to course setter Jakob Knoef for the tip.
Here is Jabob’s intro about the terrain – keep this in mind when considering your route choice on the leg:
This map is a classic New Zealand pine forest map. This area is extremely steep, with a lot of gravel, branches and fallen trees underneath the canopy. Despite the high visibility, runnability can vary from very fast to very slow, depending on the gradient, and following contours can be quite slow going.
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. Note that the times are according to GPS here, but that should not influence the analysis much.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.
Here is what course setter Jakob has to see about the leg:
There were not many elite competitors due to this being quite close to the Sprint World Cups and World Champs, so there is not a lot of gps tracks to go off. Remembering discussions with the event controller and also with competitors after the race, the straight then right route choice (editors comment: blue alternative) was the most efficient, however it had a lot of difficult contouring. Many took the road (green variant), and this was a far easier and safer route choice. Going straight (yellow) was of course the shortest, but also the most climb and brutally physical.
As an addition to Jakob’s analysis, below the routes are colored according to pace, with green for pace faster than 6 min/km, yellow between 6 and 10 min/km and red for slower than 10 min/km. As you can see, the steep hillside at the blue route is really slow, but the route is so much shorter than going around on the road that this is still the fastest alternative.
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!
