World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is another leg from hilly Czech terrain – this time from the European Youth Orienteering Championships Long distance. This is the type of leg where you HAVE to decide where to run before leaving the control …
Thanks a lot to Stanislav for suggesting this leg as a part of his nomination the Course of the Year 2025 (head over here to vote for among other this course).
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 this analysis it is clear that there are three very different alternatives that are all very good – and a lot of possibilities to take routes in-between these main alternatives where you can lose a lot of time,
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. Interestingly, the four fastest routes – all within 33 seconds – are run on three widely different variants. Thus it may seem like we haven’t got a clear winner among the route choices this time. Usually that means that I would have preferred the leg to be balanced slightly differently so that one variant is clearly better, but the others are still chosen. But this is a very complex, long leg in the youth classes, so a clearer winner and loser among the variants here would maybe have introduced too much “luck” into the results?
Here the 5 main variants are shown separately, including the total time (excluding the last controls) of the runners.
And finally overall times an overview of who chose the different variants and the fastest times. The darker part is for the best 25% of the finishers. When looking closely at overall time versus time on the leg, I would give a small advantage to the red route (right)…
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!
