World of O News
Today’s leg in Route to Christmas 2025 is an epic 3.8 km long leg from the “long night” of the largest international orienteering relay, Jukola. And what a leg – here you can get mentally exhausted just by trying to figure out where to run!
Thanks a lot to Agnar Reolen for the tip! Another reason for including the Jukola leg just today was that I got motivated by listening to Ivar Lundanes talk about the course earlier today in this week’s edition of Ivarnational Orienteering Podcast where Ivar & Ivar discussed Course of the Year 2025 (voting is still possible here), including a sequence where Ivar Lundanes discusses his personal “Top 5 List”.
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. The routechoices here are obviously influenced by the fact that this was a relay where many runners probably wanted to have company (a funny story related to that in Ivarnational’s Podcast), but
To give some more insights into the different part of the leg, here we have compared the different parts of the leg. First out of the leg – the fastest variant overall of Koovee is clearly also the fastest on this first part of the leg:
Taking a look at the variants to the left, you can see that if you want to go left (which does seem to be slower overall whatever you do here at the start of the leg, probably due to the extra length when going left), you should probably do it at once and not first go to the lake:
Comparing straight and right on the first half of the leg, it here seems quite clear that straight is faster – probably due to the extra climb when running right:
Comparing the second part of the leg, it seems clear that going right is the fastest, probably due to more road running and less elevation gain:
Below the routes are colored according to variant to give a clearer view of the how many runners chose each variant:
And finally only the main variants included:
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!
