World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is a long leg from the long distance race at Aguiar da Beira ‘O’ Meeting (ABOM), organized in Portugal in the end of February.
The courses at the long distance of ABOM 2025 look very interesting overall, and Simon Hector wrote the following when nominating the M21E1 course for Course of the Year 2025 (last chance to vote today!)
– I would like to nominate Aguiar da Beira O Meeting Long distance Men Elite. As real length long distances start to get fewer, I would like to give a shout-out to a race weekend featuring a real long distance and making it a really good one – using the most of the area, giving a varied course with both faster sections in open areas and well runnable forest as well as trickier sections in green and steep areas. What I especially like is that the course offered route choices also on shorter legs, so that you always had to be ahead in your orienteering. During the course, you really had to hit the crucial passages through the bushes at the same time as having to push hard in the many uphills. A good long distance course!
There were several interesting legs both in the M21E course and in some of the other courses I took a look at – also some of the shorter legs as Hector points out. In the end I decided for the longest leg in the M21E2 course due to the balancing of the leg. 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. Straight (following the terrain) is clearly fastest here, with some quite good split times also being run around to the right where you run more on paths and roads. Running around to the left was clearly slower here, being too long.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. Also note that there are many different micro routechoices on the straight (red) route here, so even if you take the correct overall route choice, there is plenty of opportunity to lose time here. Just as Hector pointed out, “During the course, you really had to hit the crucial passages through the bushes at the same time as having to push hard in the many uphills.”
Here is the route of the fastest rounner on each of the variants, including a coarse elevation profile from Google Elevation for each of them:
It is also interesting to take a look at the similar leg that was run in M21E. The control the leg started at was placed a bit more to the right, making the route to the left even less relevant. Also, the route to the right got a bit more relevant – here actually the 3rd and 4th fastest split on the leg was run to the right, with the two fastest being run straight. Probably it is possible to run the route to the right quite a lot faster also in the M21E2 course.
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!
