World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from Italy – a country we visit every pre-Christmas! This time we have chosen a long leg in very hilly terrain that challenged the world’s best junior orienteers at the Junior Orienteering World Championships this July.
Thank you very much to Terje Mathisen for the excellent tip! 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. 
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. A lot of different variants were chosen by the competitors, and four main of these variants where good – the turquoise, the blue, the green and the purple. The fastest runner on each of those four variants were actually within half a minute as you can see below. But looking at analysis of the different parts of the leg separately (at the bottom of the article), the turquoise should be the fastest if runners managed to execute it well.
Taking a closer look at the six main alternatives (with an approximate elevation profile below the map), we can see that the reason the left (red) and the right (orange) are slow is there is too much climb – in addition the orange one is also substantially longer. The four other alternatives have approximately the same amount of climb, but the purple being a bit shorter.
Below is also a pace plot where you can see the pace on the different variants.
Also some routes for part of the leg:
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!
