World of O News
In today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 we travel all the way to New Zealand! Here we offer a long leg from the JWOC trials and South Islands Championships in February. On this leg there were lots of different alternatives chosen by the runners – showing “a rainbow across the map”.
Thanks a lot to course setter Matt Bixley for the tip – and also for setting a very interesting course. According to the bulletin, the vegetation is mapped on its runability rather than its visibility. Vegetation cover is predominately mature beech forest which provides areas of good visibility with patchy undergrowth. There is a lot of light green that is easier to run through than see through. Although there are many pigs and deer in residence they have not kept up with vegetation growth. From the bulletin it is also notable that the Ongaonga (NZ tree nettle urtica ferox) has been seen in the forest – “Be aware that it is toxic. Severe stinging can last for days and in rare cases, can be fatal” – although no problem for the “armchair orienteers” of Route to Christmas.
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). You can also take a look at some terrain pictures in the event inviation here.
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. Note that the same leg was used in both M21 (15-16) and M20 (9-10) – with many good competitors on the start. Times shown are GPS-times rather than official split times, but with the large time-differences that should not influence the interpretation of the results.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. In the course-setters opinion, Nick Hann (4th fastest time at +4:31, purple) took the best route to the right, while Joseph Lynch (fastest time, centre left, green) and Linus Werneström (second best time, +1:21, hard left, blue) also took good routes. Straight (red) could also be good.
Based on my analysis of the time on this leg compared to the total time across the two classes, it may seem like the green and blue alternatives (hard left and centre left) are the good alternatives here, with large potential to lose time straight (red). The main reason for the time losses on the red routes seems to be that passing of the gullies slows the runners down a lot, and there is also a lot more map reading involved, with higher risk for small micro-routechoice errors. Going all the way to the right also seems slower based on the splits, but with only one runner on this choice it is difficult to make a good assessment.
Here you can see the pace (in min/km) along the different routes – and it is clearly visible how the passing of the gullies slows the runners down – and also how the route to the left has very few slow areas.
It is also nice to take a look at the elevation profiles for the four main routes (although with relatively poor accuracy from Google Elevation API):
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 2025-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!
