World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 takes us to the long distance race Närkekvartetten in Sweden – the 5th race in this years’ Swedish League. A quite interesting long leg where you have to consider straight versus around.
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).
For the evaluation of the leg, the terrain description from the race bulletin may be useful: The terrain is described as forest area with a sparsely connected network of trails and a few forestry roads, including areas with a high level of detail. The elevation is described as moderately to very hilly terrain (for Sweden, that is). Runability is described as good – the vegetation mainly consists of coniferous forest of varying ages. Areas with dense forest occur, as well as several smaller areas with fallen trees affected by bark beetle infestation, hindering runability and it is represented as green line screens on the map. There are rocky sections on some slopes.
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 majority of the runners chose to run around on the road, and this also seemed to be the fastest option. Although Simon Imark (straight) only lost 52 seconds to the fastet time of Viktor Svensk (left on the road), the risk of losing more time when running straight is high, as you have to navigate accurately to avoid time losses. It is still interesting too note that 2 of the fastest 8 times are run straight, so with good execution straight is actually a quite good option, but I would say the reward is too low compared to the added risk for most runners. Even Gustav Bergman (not on Livelox, but he posted his route on his Doma-archive) chose to take the road here.
Looking at the elevation profile of the various options (see below ; note that this is not 100% accurate elevation data), there are not very big differences in climb on the different options, but there is a small advantage in taking the rightmost options.
Coloring the four main alternatives according to pace, we can see why going to the left is so advantageous. Although 1 km longer, around 30% of the route to the left can be run faster than 3:30 min/km and 60% between 3:30 and 6 min/km. In contract, the straight options are run around 50% with pace between 3:30 and 6 min/km and 50% with pace above 6 min/km. The low-pace areas are mostly due to a combination of forest ground with uphill, but some of the marshy areas also slow the runners down significantly on the straight options.
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, 3DRerun, Loggator or Livelox from 2024-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 gets interesting due to YOUR 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!
