Route to Christmas: Day 22 2014

– I have the feeling that this was the leg this year were i spent most time. Today we take a look at a leg from the sprint course of the year – the PWT Stirling Race the Castles in Scotland. The chosen leg is leg number 14 in the M21E course – and the race was organized at October 12th 2014.

This leg has been suggested by several – one of them Graham Gristwood who wrote me that “I think even looking at splits after [the race], nobody could decide the best route”. I do have an idea though – I’ll let you in on it after you have tried yourself.

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 (split times here). First off, note that the GPS-data is quite poor here like often in city sprints. However, the correct split times are imported, so the times/colors you see are correct. Thus this analysis still tells us the answers. Secondly, note that Søren Bobach’s route is not on here because his GPS didn’t work. Bobach won both this race and the WOC sprint – but this was probably his worst leg in both those races together – he lost more than 20 seconds to the best split here running close to the route of Murray Strain. You can see all of Bobach’s route in the interview with Bobach for course of the year.

So I would say it seems quite easy to conclude here (but of course I might be wrong): The route to the left of Michiels, Hubmann, Thrane Hansen is clearly the fastest. The middle one taken by Strain and Bobach is some seconds slower (Bobach really spent a lot of time thinking here…?). Strain could maybe have earner a second or so by going left at the start of the leg like Michiels did it.

Density map

See below for a density map of some of the ones who have drawn their routes so far.

Additional information

You find the complete map in omaps.worldofo.com at this location.

Route to Christmas series

The Route to Christmas series at World of O has been very popular the last years – and I have therefore decided to continue the series this Christmas as well. If you have got any good legs in RouteGadget, GPSSeuranta or 3DRerun from 2014-competitions – or old forgotten ones which are still interesting – please email me the link at Jan@Kocbach.net, and I’ll include 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!

Note that there may be some errors in the Routegadget data (sometimes somebody draws a route for another runner just for fun). Please add a comment below if you spot en error.