Route to Christmas: Day 6 2024

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is an interesting leg from one of the large spring-races in Norway – the Halden O-Meeting Long distance organized in the middle of April.

This is typical terrain for the Østfold/Halden area, with quite soft ground, many smaller hills and some paths and roads where you can run faster. 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.

As you can see, the fastest was clearly to run right- but instead of going all the way out to the road, it was faster (and also more popular among the runners) to take the marshes towards the control. Quite a few runners took a more direct route – or even left – but this clearly looks slower.

Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. The 9 fastest times where run along the half-right variant (red), so this does clearly seem to be the fastest route – with the road (blue) being 40-50 seconds slower, and straight (green) another half a minute slower. Looking at the pace plot at the bottom, it seems like the reason for straight being slow is that there are some very slow areas along the route, not that easily identifiable on the map.

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!