World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2020 is from interesting sandstone terrain in the Czech Republic. This time we study the Czech Championships Middle distance – with several international stars on the startline – based on a tip by Ladislav Semrad.
The leg is quite short – but gives you the typical type of choices you meet in this terrain type. 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 GPS-data is obviously a bit inaccurate in this terrain type, but you can clearly see how the field splits into two halves (with the exception of one athlete running all the way around on the road and losing significant time). The fastest route choice is running below the cliffs (see the route drawn in more detail below; note that somewhat inaccurate GPS split times are shown here). The tipster Semrad writes the following about this route:
[It was] faster when following contours under high sandstone cliffs. I think, these choices required some kind of experience with this type of terrain, and it is interesting, that Daniel Hubmann both times for this type of legs chooses wrong (but Florian Howald both times correct!). The answer is, that you not only skip a lot of climbing, but under high rocks there are quite comfortable paths, made by animals or probably rock climbers.
In Vojtech Kral’s Doma-archive you can also read that Kral estimates his timeloss by running up to the left to be around 20 seconds.
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 2020-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 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!
