World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2024 is a spectacular leg from the European Youth Championships (EYOC) organized in Poland this summer. This time the women’s W18 course is chosen.
As you can see from the map, this is quite hilly terrain, with quite a few paths and also some roads that could potentially be used for routechoices. Here is what the bulletin said about the terrain:
Vegetation varies from very good to limited due to rich undergrowth. Mostly deciduous forest (beech) with good visibility.
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.
Quite a spread of the runners! Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. From these illustrations it seems quite clear that going around to the left on the road (red route) is the fastest variant, despite it being 4-500 meter longer. When looking at the map in detail (or checking the elevation profile of the main alternatives towards the bottom of this analysis), you can see that you do save some climb by going red, and you also get the possibility to run very fast in slight downhill on the road. Actually the fastest runners ran more than half of the leg at pace 5 min/km and faster on the red route, while the runners barely came below 5 min/km on the more straight-left variant (dark yellow), which was the second fastest. Going right (blue) is also not much slower than the dark yellow variant. Note that more runner chose the blue/dark yellow variant than the fastest red 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!
