World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is a very interesting leg from the Junior European Orienteering Cup (JEC) in Loch Ard Forest in Scotland this autumn. This is slow terrain, but it looks very long to go around – what would you choose?
This course was suggested by Ivar Lundanes as his candidate for “The Course of the Year 2025″ (suggest your candidate here): – The JEC Long Distance in Loch Ard Forest was a proper course in a great terrain. Nice mix of route choice challenges and tricky controls in green areas and slopes in all 4 courses, but if I have to pick one I’d say the M20 course looks the best.
And that’s the course we chose here – and the leg of interest is the leg to the 14th control. The other courses had similar legs, but differently balanced – maybe even the leg in M18 is more interesting based on the routechoice.
The chosen 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. As you can see, there are quite big time differences here – many athletes really struggled in this hilly, green terrain. Still, very few chose to run the road around to the left. Even if the three fastest routes are run straight, my guess is that many of the runners opting to run straight would have saved time by running on the road to the left due to the tricky orienteering and the slow going in this terrain.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. As you can see, the three fastest routes are run straight (these are GPS-based split times, but the three first are well ahead of the rest). The next four run around to the left, while all the way around to the right is clearly slower. Note also that, Rosen who was the fastest around to the left, actually did a mistake by taking the wrong road (or changed his plan) – taking 40 seconds extra, so without this mistake he would have been only around 30 seconds slower than the fastest route on the leg.
Here we also show the fastest route on each variant – and below approximate elevation profiles. Note how the blue variant is faster than the purple due to less climb. The red route is shorter with even less climb, but probably too much in the green.
Finally also a pace comparison, shown how many slow-going areas there are here …
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!
