World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is from a fun map in a very cool area in Czech Republic: Today we traveli to Czech sandstones – a dream area for orienteering!
The leg is from the second stage of the Pekne Prazdniny race, organized this August. Thanks a lot to Toby Heppell for the tip! It 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. The routes are colored according to fastest split time on the leg, with the fastest routes in green and the slowest in red.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. Did you manage to spot that the blue variant (right-left S) was the fastest variant? It looks like a majority of the runners in Men 21 Elite did. Personally I was a bit overwhelmed by the leg, and would probably have chosen the “mentally easy” green variant to the left. The blue variant is around 100 meters shorter than the green one, but the reason for blue being faster is not the length, but that fact that you avoid the big climbs/uphills which really slow you down in this terrain. Looking at the pace-colored variants a few illustrations down, you can see that for the blue variant it was possible to run a pace below 8 min/for all of the leg, while there was a quite long slower part on the green variant.
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!
Another great leg.
I would like to say many thanks to Jan as well for his tremdendous work with Route to Christmas year by year.
It sweetens up these cold days where running and orienteering outside needs an extra portion of motivation.