World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is another one from Italy- this time from the Coppa Italia Long distance race in Trentino in October. The chosen leg is the 11th in the Men Elite course. This is based on a tip from Mikkel Lyskjær – thanks a lot 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. As you can see, timewise it is very similar to go down in the valley and take a very tough climb (Mamleev, +8 sec) or run around in the hillside and take a shorter but even steeper climb (Merl, fastest split time). Looking at the level of the runners, the results on this split is quite similar to the overall results. Thus, the routechoice on this leg does not seem to be very important. However, this might be a good opportunity to choose the leg with less climb to save some energy for the rest of the course (although the very steep climb may maybe be even more tiring?). This is definitely a place where it is easy to make mistakes – several of the runners do mistake into the control – no wonder after such a tough climb…
Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.
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 or 3DRerun from 2018-competitions – or old forgotten ones which are still interesting – please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll include 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!
The analysis shows clearly that it is necessary to add also the climbing. The route length is not always the main thing – especially in alpine terrain. Robi was fastest on a 20 % longer route – because of much less climbing. (That would also have been my own route choice.)
@Jan: This will be the new challenge for further improvement of your analysis ;-)
This map has slope shading! Is this normal in Italy?
Only for the GPS tracking, the athletes used a regular map.