World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is a leg in spectacular surroundings from the 7th Swiss National Event this year at Long Heinzenberg.
– A never before mapped gem with as always in the swiss mountains stunning surroundings and views, Silvan Ullmann wrote when nominating this course for Course of the Year 2025.
– Many sections with very detailed terrain, the tough underground and technically challenging legs, where especially the execution was key, made this race a real long distance experience.
Ullmann also indicated that some legs might be relevant for Route to Christmas. After taking a closer look, I did indeed find a leg in the M21E category that I think is interesting and relevant. 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. As you can see, the fastest option is to go straight, and very few decide to use the paths. The only one running around on the path to the right is actually Silvan Ullman – a route choice I think several of World of O’s readers will find relevant…?
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant.
Here the fastest route on each of the four variants is shown separately, along with a coarse Google Elevation plot for the elevation profiles below. As you can see, the main reasons for the purple path-route being slower is the extra climb and the extra length, with the runnability in the terrain not being that slow here after all.
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!
