World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is a leg from the French Championships Long distance in hilly terrain which gives some nice opportunities for route choices.
The tip from Eva Jurenikova from this competition was actually for another leg (leg 11, M21), but after reviewing the course I decided that the third leg in M21 also has some interesting characteristics, but follow the link to the course at the bottom of this post and check out control 11 if you want an additional challenge. 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. Interestingly, quite a few runners were tempted by the large path to the left, even if that involves crossing a green area with reduced runnability out of the control. Running to the right gives mostly path running, a route which is not much longer than the other alternatives, and also not more climb. It would be interesting to understand why so many took other alternatives here – and I am also interested to see what the community decides.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.
And a clearer view of the fastest runner on each of the four main variants:
Finally a pace visualization comparing the pace on the main four variants:
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!
To add a piece of information that could answer the question of why so many runner didn’t go to the right: what we can’t see from this image, is that the yellow area was in fact the race arena! In fact you were not allowed to cross it outside the path (the choice of the community as I write this would not be allowed). It did influenced me to avoid the area.
But it was allowed to run at the edge and the choice of Mathieu Perrin is indeed certainly the best one.
Thank you for this advent calendar, I’m always fond of it :)