This Sunday at eight o’clock the Vasaloppet, the Wasalauf in Sweden, starts on the first Sunday in March. When Klaus Bogenberger starts telling about his participation in the most famous folk cross -country race last year, his eyes shine. “It was a great experience,” he says. Like film scenes, many moments burned into his memory. How 16,000 people are in the dark in the dark, still wrapped in thick jackets and pants. Guide animators warm -up exercises. How the starting shot falls and the amount slowly starts in motion. How he mastered the 90 -kilometer route from Hälen to Mora in the lonely landscape of Dalarna, exhausted and happy in 6694.
Klaus Bogenberger also says: “It is not a long -term pleasure. It is nicer to walk alone on Lake Tegernsee. ” Because the Wasalauf suffers from a problem that city dwellers, commuters, travelers know all too well: traffic jam.
It is due to the route profile why the initial phase in particular is so difficult to manage. The cross -country trails – it is run in a classic style – quickly into a needle. “Imagine a highway with 49 traces, and if you arrive at the top of the Irschenberg, there are only seven left,” explains Bogenberger. The first steep climb after a few hundred meters also means: overtaking maneuvers are hardly possible. Some passages stand out. Participants slip out. In many, the sticks break, from the back pressure. You have to traverses for replacement sticks. After 200 meters on a distance of three kilometers, everyone reaches a kind of plateau, “after that, the Wasalauf is actually not that difficult,” says Bogenberger. “But up to half of the route you move in a crowd like in car traffic.”
Bogenberger knows all of this exactly because the Wasalauf was not over for him afterwards. The Niederbayer is a traffic scientist and university professor at the Technical University of Munich, and after the return he decided to examine the Wasalauf exactly. He joined the science colleagues Martin Driver and Patrick Malcolm. “Traffic Jams in Large Scale Sporting Events – The Vasaloppet Adventure”, under this title they created their study, which will soon be in science publication Physics A is published. Then Bogenberger will send you the organizers of the Wasalauf.
“The vasaloppet has been around since 1922. It has so much tradition that you won’t intervene,” says Bogenberger
In order to take a certain disappointment, Bogenberger says that nothing will change at the end of the race and in particular the starting situation. “The vasaloppet has been around since 1922,” says Bogenberger, “it has so much tradition, you won’t intervene.” Just as the lawn is always played in Wimbledon, sports classics are inviolable. Bogenberger still drove his curiosity as a scientist to check whether and to what extent a wave start, as debated for years, would not be better. The result was: Of course he is, only thanks to Bogenberger and his colleagues is now also occupied.
Two huge amounts of data formed the basis of their study. The organizer of the Wasalauf got the intermediate times of all runners. In addition, they asked the participants to send them the data recorded on the wrist using a tracking clock. 200 followed the call: “With this data we were able to see exactly how much time everyone loses in what section, where there are disorders and how the individual groups move.” Bogenberger’s starting variants were able to simulate with a computer program. In the wave start model, for example, the eleven performance groups lined up in a row (the best) run in time intervals. The rule was also true here: only time for everyone began to run when crossing the starting line.
A radical approach would still be to fell trees and to create more traces
Bogenberger shows a graphic with many colorful lines. “Here you can see that in the real race the runners lost around an hour in the middle when they arrived on the altitude plateau. The last runner even takes almost two hours. The first are up in 20 minutes. ” It looks better at the wave start. “The last runner still only arrives at the top after two hours. But it started an hour later, ”says Bogenberger and shows on lines in another graphic. “He has a term of one hour. Because he is no longer on the climb forever. ” Another advantage: Less wear out, many would also create the whole race. Those who do not reach a certain time window half of the race are removed from the rating. You would not make it to Mora before dark. The sunset is also the reason why the starting intervals could not be stretched at a wave start. A radical approach would still be to fell trees and create more traces. But such an intervention would be unthinkable. The character of the Wasalauf would change so that it would no longer be the Wasalauf.
This is exactly why the start is not relocated to the first high plateau. It is started below, as always. The runners, Bogenberger emphasizes, have to cope with the traffic jam: “It is a big fight in the head.” Bogenberger had participated in a qualification race over half of the Wasalaufen last year, he took three hours. So he was assigned to the seventh starting group. Shortly afterwards the real run came, of course Bogenberger did not simply manage the 90 kilometers in two times. “It took me nine and a half hours,” he says and laughs. The traffic jams of the Vasalopt are not to be defeated. Not even from highly sporty traffic scientists.
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