World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is a 3.4 km long leg from the men’s H21 class in the Finnish Championships Long distance, organized close to Tampere in early September 2025.
This very interesting course from the Finnish Champs Long was suggested by Joni Parviainen for Course of the Year 2025, and the 8th leg was pointed out by Christoph Salzmann in the comments as “Absolute great stuff!!! 7 to 8 is both extremely challenging and physically demanding”. So I had to head over and take a look, and what a leg! The leg is set in a terrain consisting of a mix of open rocky hilltops, marshes, some dense forest parts and some logging roads. Looking at the leg, there is nothing that looks really tempting – but you just need to make a choice and make sure you execute well.
If you haven’t made a suggestion for “The Course of the Year 2025″ yet, I’d suggest to head over and submit your suggestion in the comments. Prizes worth more than 7000 Euros are up for grabs. If you happen to be the first to suggest the course which is voted as “The Course of the Year 2025″ you will get the prize of your choice – and there are also further prizes drawn among the ones suggestion courses.
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. A very wide spread of chosen routes – but it seems clear that running quite straight, slightly to the right of the line and exploting some roads there, is the fastest choice. There are also several fast times on the variants to the right, and also on the road around to the left. But in-between there are good opportunities to lose time if you don’t use the roads enough.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant, and which variants are faster. As you can see, 3 of the 4 fastest time are run straight (red), the second fastest time is run around to the left (green) and the 5th and 6th fastest time are run far around to the right. All of these routes do to some extent exploit roads and avoid the “friction” given by broken terrain and big hills.
Here you can see the 5 different options (the fastest route on each of them):
And here you can see the pace of each of these runners – with green being around 3:30 min/km and red around 10 min/km.
Finally a direct comparison between the two best alternatives:
And as you are now finished reading the analysis, it is now probably time to head over to “The Course of the Year 2025″ to submit your suggestion in the comments if you haven’t done it yet.
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!
