Route to Christmas: Day 18 2020

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2020 is from Portugal. This time we travel to a junior national team training camp where the athletes ran a competition on an interesting course. Thanks a lot to Tomás Lima for the tip and providing some analysis.

Here is some background information from Lima:

 I believe the main things to take in consideration when making the routechoice decision are:
– the day of the race and the previous days were very hot, with temperatures peaking maybe over 35°C;< – this was in summer, so vegetation is usually overgrown in some areas, with the dark greens being the most dangerous;
– this was the first longer leg from a quite long course, so maybe saving some energy could be nice.
‘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. Here is the analysis from Lima:

I think 2 main routes pop out on this leg: big road on the north or paths and then straight descent through the south; and of course some more straight variations like Vasco’s one and others.

From the routes available, I believe only Vasco Mendes performed close to perfection. Rodrigo Oliveira lost too much time getting to the road and Tomás Lima (me) didn’t have the right direction after the end of the little path and so lost some time on the cliffs and greens at the beginning of the descent. 

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!