Route to Christmas: Day 16 2025

Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is the 14th leg from the European Youth Orienteering Championships (EYOC) in Czechia. A few days ago we featured a leg from the EYOC Long distance, so at EYOC the route setters really did a good job in great terrains.

Thanks a lot to John Casey for the tip! As a sidenote, both EYOC Sprint and EYOC Long are also nominated for the Course of the Year 2025! 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):

Note! In the map below (where you draw your route) the out-of-bounds areas are missing. This was also the case in the initial version of the map here – this was updated after comments about missing out-of-bounds areas.

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 (below the out-of-bounds areas are missing, but you should plan your route as if they were there – sorry for that!). 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. The W18 and M16 categories had the same leg, and here in the M18 class it is quite clear that running straight was the fastest alternative, and that you lost some time (more about how much below) by going to the right where nearly half of the runners ran. Running to the left also seems like a very good option (better than right), but not many saw this alternative. In the M16 category we had a similar pattern with straight being clearly the fastest and right being the slower option. However, interestingly, in the W18 category straight and right seemed quite equal time-wise, even when factoring in the level of the runners.

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

Here is a closer view of each of the three variants, and below is an illustration which shows how many chose each alternative, and the fastest time on each variant.

Here is also a table showing the estimated time loss for variant B (left, 5 seconds) and variant C (right, 12 seconds).

Chosen variant ordered by leg result

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!