World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2020 is leg 6 in the M21 course from Norwegian Championships Ultralong. Thanks a lot to Tibor Vari 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, it is clearly fastest to run to the left of the forbidden area, like most of the runners did. For the choice to the left of the forbidden area, you can split the leg into two halves. For the second part, it looks like one should run as straight as possible, not following the small paths (which don’t really go in the right direction). For the first part, time differences are smaller, but it looks like it is an advantage to follow the smaller paths, but due to varying level for the runners it is not clear what is the best option here. Did you run the race and have any thought on the route choice here?
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!
The small paths were “relatively slow due to rocks & roots as well as lots of micro ups & downs and small bends” (T. Mathisen 2020), and the forrest quite fast (good visability and less undergrowth then you often find in this part of Norway). Therefore you didn’t gain that much by chosing paths.
For the first part of the leg I think mine and Auduns route are quite equal, and Audun gains time simply because he is runnig faster. The second part of the leg Audun finds the best route and executes it really well. If I were to run the leg again I would take the same route again the first part, with some small adjustments, and Auduns route the second half.
Also, it would have been nice with Håkon JWs route to in the analysis (it’s on Livelox). He used 27.24 and ran to the right, further to the right than Vegard BJ at the midle part.