Route to Christmas: Day 11 2025

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is one of the courses that has been among the most popular in the nomination for Course of the Year 2025: The World Orienteering Championships Long distance.

Note also that today is your last chance to add nominations for Course of the Year 2025, so time to head over and check if your favourite is already nominated.

We have here chosen a decisive and very interesting leg in the women’s class – the leg from control 11 to 12 (with a very similar leg in the men’s class, though). Again thanks a lot to Eva Jurenikova for the 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. As you can see,  running around on the road (not all the way around, though) is clearly the best choice here, with many good athletes losing a lot of time on the straight route.

Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.

Looking at the top finishers, you can see that Aebersold runs the best route choice to the left, while Alexandersson runs straight and loses nearly a minute.

The very similar leg was also very decisive in the battle for the silver and bronze medals in the men’s class: Here Emil Svensk ran the slower route to the right and lost the silver medal. Kyburz’s did several small mistakes, including to the 5th control and the routes to the 16th and 18th control, but it was still enough to secure the bronze medal.

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!