World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is a long and interesting leg in Slovenian Karst terrain. The chosen leg is the 7th leg from the second stage of Lipica Open – thanks a lot to course setter Ivan Nagy for the tip!
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.
As you can see, two of the left variants (blue and red) are clearly the fastest, while running to the right (purple or yellow) is significantly slower. What makes this leg interesting is that around half of the runners chose one of the variants to the right, losing significant time on the route choice. Looking at why going left is so much faster, the main reason is the both the variants to the right have a lot more climb, as you there have to climb a large hill.
Below the Google elevation API is used to plot the elevation profile of each of the variants. These data are not accurate enough to look at the climb-values for each variant, but you see how the variants to the right climb a lot early on the leg, which the variants to the left avoid this large climb at the start of the leg. Looking at the pace (the last illustration), it is also seen clearly that both the climb and the steep downhill towards the control are slow on the purple route.
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!
