Route to Christmas: Day 17 2019

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from a very hilly terrain in northern Italy. The leg was used in both the men’s and the women’s elite classes at Coppa Italia long distance at the Viote map.

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. We first take a look at three distinct routes for the men: Either running around on the road (blue), all the way over the hill (red) or somewhere inbetween (green). Going around is around 200 meter longer, but with around 40 meters less climb than all the way over the top and 20 meters less climb than the middle variant. Note that there is also a middle variant where you follow the slope on one elevation run by Verena Troi in the women’s class (see routes further down), but although you save some 30-40 meters of elevation here, it is 40-50 seconds slower than the green route due to lots of fallen trees in the slope. Going over the top is clearly too much climb, but the middle variant could be good if executed well.

Here is a look at all of the men’s routes:

And then all of the women:

From the women’s routes it may look like over the top is fastest (Fauner), but when you look closer at the routes you can see that none of the fast runners ran a good routechoice here, and the conclusion is the same as in the men’s that either around or the middle one is the fastest route. This again shows how important it is to go deeper into the analysis and not only look at the fastest route on the leg!

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 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!