World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is leg an interesting leg from the long distance competition Maximus O Meeting organized in Spain back in February this year. We look at the men’s super-elite course, and again the forest is fast.
Comments from the map-makers from the race Bulletin:
This is the terrain with very good runnability, fast terrain, but challenging technically. It is not often that you can meet such a big area with so good runnability all the way, it is going to be a fun long distance. One special thing about this map is a very unique area with a very detailed slope. There aren’t many stones and cliffs, just few of them, but contour details will definitely challenge you.
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. The routes are colored according to fastest split time on the leg, with the fastest routes in green and the slowest in red.
There is a wide spread in routechoice, with the fastest routes being run on a slight left variant – starting over the small hill close to the control. Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. Here you can clearly see that the blue and green routes are the fastest, i.e. the straight ones and the slight left ones. The 16 fastest routes are blue or green, with about half in each color. Running all around to the left (purple) or right (dark yellow) was clearly to far around in this fast terrain. The variant slightly to the right (red) is also too slow, probably due to too much green forest to pass through in the hillside.
Here you can see the alternatives clearer, with only the fastest for each alternative shown. Also interesting is the elevation profile for each route as shown further below (note that accuracy of the Google elevation is not perfect for the elevation profiles, but it actually seems to be quite good in this area by comparing map and elevation profile). The fastest route does take some extra climb in the start, but with good runnability up to the small hill, this is still the fastest alternative.
Finally we also take a look at running speed along the main alternatives.
We can here clearly see why the variants slightly to the right are slow – the green in the slopes does not seem to make it possible to run faster than 5 min/km. In contrast, the routes to the left allow the runners to be below 5 min/km for most of the leg (except out of the control). In addition, it is interesting to note that there are some areas which seem to force the runners to slow down when running down the slope (not directly identifyable on the map). Looking at the running speed of the runner going around to the right, it would probably have been possible to run faster here (more below 3:30 min/km).
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!
