World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is an interesting long leg from the men’s Superelite in the Maximus O Meeting 2025, organized in Spain in the middle of February. Very stony terrain – and also quite hilly! What would you choose here?
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. From the analysis it is very obvious that everybody except 5 runners in M21 Superelite understood that it was faster to run left, mainly because the variant to the left has less climb. It might be tempting to go all around to the right on the road for the good runnability on the road, but then you would get a longer route in addition to the added climb. Even if it seems very obvious when looking at the analysis, I decided to include this leg more as a “trap” as it is maybe not that obvious for an armchair orienteer?
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give an even clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.
And finally the coarse elevation profile for the fastest alternative to the left and right – note the extra climb:
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!
