World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a really nice route choice leg from Czech Republic! The chosen leg is leg 11 from the Czech Long Distance Championships in september.
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, a wide variety of routes were chosen. The fastest route here is to run slightly to the left, a mix of Vojtech Kral’s and Milos Nykodym’s route; Nykodym loses some 40-45 seconds on an extra “detour” to the left.
This is a leg where you have to climb a lot on all routes, and it may be tempting to try to run around and take the control from “the back” to avoid some climb with a routechoice to the right. However, to do that you have to be brave and drop down some 50 meters first, and due to the extra length of this alternative, in addition to not solving that much climb, it is still too slow. If somebody wants to count/calculate the meters of climb for the main alternatives and add it in the comments, that would be very interesting additional information for the analysis, and I would definitely update the article with the information. Any other comments on the routechoices here are also very welcome – this is really a nice leg!
Comment from Nixon:
I don’t think you can say the right option of Stepan Mudrak is not a good option. He is only 71s behind Kral on this leg. If you look at his performance on the rest of the course he was 11% slower, on this leg it was only 8%. This doesn’t allow for any mistakes. If you look at leg 22, the only other long leg where they took the same route and there is almost no navigation, he is 12% slower than Kral. He might have lost 71s, but he probably should have lost more, so maybe this is actually a good route but we don’t know it because none of the best runners took it.
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!
What happened to the old course planner credo that you should avoid dog legs?
I don’t think you can say the right option of Stepan Mudrak is not a good option. He is only 71s behind Kral on this leg. If you look at his performance on the rest of the course he was 11% slower, on this leg it was only 8%. This doesn’t allow for any mistakes. If you look at leg 22, the only other long leg where they took the same route and there is almost no navigation, he is 12% slower than Kral. He might have lost 71s, but he probably should have lost more, so maybe this is actually a good route but we don’t know it because none of the best runners took it.
Thanks a lot for checking that out, Nixon! I’ll add it to the article.
Approx climb:
Kral 200m Mudrak 135m
distance run:
Kral 2083m Mudrak 2616m
so 533m extra distance for 65m less climb
S shaped routes (like Kral’s) are often a bit longer than they look – ie compared to Mudrak’s route you don’t save as much distance as you think.
If I remember correctly there is a report in Scientific Journal of Orienteering tha found that for men 10 m of climb was the equivalent of 80 m extra running (for women the ratio was closer to 10 to 100). Rob´s data show 10 m climb to 82 m extra distance.
In other words the route choiceds are equal.
Thanks a lot, Bernt, Nixon and Rob! My dream scenario for “Route to Christmas” was always that I would prepare the basis and illustrations for a good analysis, and that the community would contribute in analyzing the leg like you have done for this particular leg. Unfortunately there are few high quality comments like yours; more of this would really have increased both the quality and fun of the calendar! More of this :-)
For about 10 years I tracked all my races with Casio-type hand-held split times, and counted climb on each leg: I found that if I increased the leg distance by around 7-10 x the climb counted by contour crossings, the effective leg speed was more or less constant. Other factors ended up being more important, like the maximum height difference for a single climb, climb on a good path vs white forest (paths matter a lot more uphill than downhill).