World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas is from a course that was described as “the best long distance race that I have run” when the course was nominated for Course of the Year a few days ago.
We are now through half of this year’s Route to Christmas legs – and we have also opened Course of the Year 2025 for voting today. Head over and vote for Course of the Year here – prizes of more than 7000 Euro go to the lucky voters!
Here is Andrew’s description of the challenges (and yes, the map looks green and tough):
The map is arguably England’s best area and was a constant technical and physical challenge – whether fighting up steep slopes or through the dense pine trees. The course headed through many different terrain types which were a challenge to transition between, starting in open visible rolling woodland and moving through felled hillside, steep rocky wooded slopes and dense woodland with intricate contour features. It offered a few challenging long legs which split the field on different route choices, still not sure which the best way to go is on some of the legs. It was a course that gave you a great sense of achievement when finishing, and I really enjoyed the ever changing challenges it threw at me.
Scott suggested a leg in the men’s class (leg 5-6) as a leg for Route to Christmas. After looking at both the men’s and women’s class, I found out that the women’s corresponding leg (4-5) is maybe even better balanced with a small movement of the control.
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, going left is clearly the fastest, even if you have to take the leg “from behind” here.
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant. The two fastest on the leg go left, but the clear winner of the day, Megan Mitchell goes straight and loses around 45 seconds. None of the top runners take the option to the right, but based on the split times compared to their total times they actually perform pretty well, so going to the right may also be a quite good alternative here. Note that you save some climb by going right, while at the same time you are running quite much on hard surface (which I am sure is a delight compared to much of the terrain here). Also when looking at the men’s course where the control corresponding to the 5th control was placed a bit more to the right, that was the clearly best choice there.
Here you can see the pace distribution. As you can see there is quite a lot of slow terrain if you run straight – and also when coming in from the right you can be unlucky and find very slow terrain.
And now that you are finished here: Time to head over and vote for Course of the Year here – prizes of more than 7000 Euro go to the lucky voters!
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!
