Route to Christmas: Day 4 2024

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is a long leg from the Junior World Orienteering Championships Long distance in Czech Republic.

This is what the bulletin said about the terrain:

The terrain is mostly hilly with rocks and stones in places high up on the hills. Mostly coniferous forest (spruce), in some parts with a larger number of clearings. Visibility and runnability are mostly good. In some places runnability is slowed by thickets, undergrowth or a rocky surface. There are many paths.

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, with coloring according to split time.

Below the routes are colored according to variant. As you can see, the fastest times were run to the left (blue variant), with the 13 fastest splits run along this route. Running right (red) and straight (purple) was around 1:20 – 1:30 slower, while the variant in-between to the right (green) seemed to be even slower. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, there is a lot of road-running around to the left on the blue route – as you can see below, around 1/3 of the route on the road could be run below 3:30 min/km. In contrast, only 6-7% of the red route was run below 3:30 min/km – and nothing on the straight route. In addition, there is less climb when running on the blue route. So even if the blue route is around 10% longer than the green route (and another 10% longer than the purple route), this is enough to make going around to the left faster.

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!