World of O News
Ready for some fun? We start off this year’s Route to Christmas with an interesting leg from the Oceania 2019 Long Distance in Australia. The chosen leg is the 4th leg in the men’s class.
This is not the longest leg in the race – we save that one for later – but it may still be challenging to find the best choice. 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). What would you choose?
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, none of the runners have tried to go straight – that is simply too tough with the extra climb. Many have, however, tried to go quite straight to run as short as possible and still saving some climb. From the map this may seem risky as it is often slower to run in steep, stony slopes – and based on the GPS split times it looks like this was the case here as well: It is faster to go further around to the right and exploit the white, flat areas to run fast like Aston Key does. Also, it is good to spend some time on the larger paths to get time to rest your head in this type of map-reading intensive terrain. Finally, going to the left is an option, but the extra climb at the start of the leg takes a lot of extra time, and in the end the runnability towards the control is not better than going right either.
Here a direct comparison of going full right or partly right:
And similar for left vs right:
Density map
See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far (coming 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 or 3DRerun from 2019-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!
