World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is a long leg from the 3+3 Long distance in Sälen, Sweden this summer – and the same leg was used both in the men’s and women’s elite course. This one looks fun and challenging!
Thanks a lot to Hugo Claesson and Eva Jurenikova for the tip. This course was also close to being nominated to Course of the Year 2025 (voting on-going, check out the Top 15 as of yesterday here), but as Matthieu put it when nominating the 3+3 Middle distance: “The Long distance was even more enjoyable to run, i think (more variations of the terrain), but the middle distance maybe looks more sexy on paper for the voters”.
This is how Hugo described the terrain when suggesting the leg: It is hilly, sometimes small stones on the ground, with mostly good visibility. like the terrain and mainly how hard it can be in the slopes. 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 in the men’s class 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. This is a leg where there seem to be several solutions which are relatively equal in time, and due to a relatively small start field it is difficult to be very certain about which route is the fastest. It does seem that going all the way down or all the way up gives you too much climb, though. Also, for this type of leg in a tricky slope like in Sälen is to be sure that you keep the risk low by having a good attackpoint and being careful towards the control.
Next we look at the women – only 7 women had GPS-tracks here:
Below the routes are colored according to variant for the men to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. Based on a combination of this visualization, the women’s analysis above and the climb/length of each variant (red is shortest without more climb), I would say that the red variant below is probably the best choice, with the green and purple being good choices as well. Jesper Svensk running the purple route is the second fastest among the men, but he took a clear victory in the race and still lost some time to Emil Rankka here. Also, the two best women on the leg took the red choice (or close to the red choice). Do you agree – please comment below if you have another opinion – especially if you ran the leg!
Here is the fastest route on each variant along with the (coarse) elevation profiles from Google Elevation:
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!
