At the registration desk at every race you fill in your details and get a map, a description card and SI stick or punch card to log your finding of the controls.
While you can bring along other specialist gear to a race, all you really need in addition to the above items are comfy clothes and running shoes.
Read moreAfter you have collected together your compass, the map, the SI stick and your control card, you’re almost ready to start.
Just remember, GPS devices that help you navigate are not allowed (GPS watches that track your distance but don’t show position are fine and very popular).
Read moreMake sure that the map and the compass flat and you turn the map around until the blue lines point north – the same direction as the red arrow on your compass will be pointing. This is called orientating the map.
Thumbing the map is another technique where you use a finger or thumb set against your route to measure your progress. For instance, on a fairly standard 1:10,000 scale map, 1cm on the map means 100 metres on the course, or about the width of a finger.
Folding the map is a common technique too where you fold up the map to just see the part of the course you’re on, making checking the map rapidly and often much easier as you run between controls.
Read moreNot stopping at controls/checkpoints is a key part of mastering faster orienteering. It’s about control-flow, or moving through the control smoothly, which is about the approach and planning the exit from the control.
For the approach, you use the symbols in your control description paper to work out the features close to the control and the control’s position relative to them. A control might be close to a boulder, but to the east side of it – and this would be shown in the control description. Of course, you will need to know the symbols denoting this information.
Planning the exit is about looking ahead of the control immediately ahead of you to the next and plotting a direction and something of the route in advance. This route planning and visualising in advance is one of the major challenges of orienteering.
Read moreWhen starting orienteering, it’s often best to pick longer, but safer routes such as along tracks, creeks and other line elements.
Often direct routes across country can be faster, but they are harder and require more compass work and can turn out to be not worthwhile if you get the route not quite right, or worse, get lost!
Read moreThe 10 Mila relay is an orienteering relay which has been held in Sweden each year from 1945.
The men’s race is a 10-leg race, held at night, while the women’s and youth versions are held during the day and consist of 5 legs.
The 10 or tio mila name means 10 Swedish miles, each mile approximating 10 metric kilometres. Unlike Jukola, 10 Mila is held in the northern spring so the night legs must be truly dark in the forest!
Read moreIn 2015 the National Sprint and Team Relay Championships of France were held in Champdieu and Chalmazel in France.
The sprint event was held in the town of Champdieu, with runners traversing the mall streets, staircases, covered passages, and dead ends of the town.
Some 1600 runners across a host of regional teams entered the Relay Championships in the woods outside Chalmazel, where runners ran through nighttime and daytime legs to contest the event.
Read moreThe hallowed Finnish Jukola Relay is the biggest orienteering relay race in the world. The name Jukola is a family name taken from the Finnish novel, Seven Brothers.
Held annually since 1949, it is held at sunset sometime between the 13th and 19th of June, with competitors racing through the night, using powerful head torches for the first 3 to 4 legs.
Seven runners run legs of between 7 and 15km, with the winning team finishing usually at around 6 or 7am. The race is contested by upwards of 1500 runners each year, from an international array of teams.
Read moreThe Scottish Six Days orienteering race is a biennial event held since 1977 and is the biggest event of its kind held in the United Kingdom.
It attracts approximately 3000 competitors and is held in different locations across Scotland.
Read moreThe World Orienteering Championships (or WOC for short) is held annually, almost always in Europe, in the countries of the founding members of the International Orienteering Federation (IOF).
The events consist of Sprint, Middle and Long Distance and the relatively new Sprint Relay.
View the rest of the highlight reels from WOC 2023 here.
Read more
At Uringa Orienteers, we are lucky enough to have some members who are really pivotal in the sport’s development in Australia. One such member is Dave Lotty, the Uringa Orienteers’ Treasurer and our Cartographer. He is also more generally a titan of the sport of orienteering in Australia.
He has been a founder of both key clubs around Sydney (including Uringa Orienteers) and the Orienteering Association of NSW, serving in numerous roles for decades.
On the national level, Dave has been active in the national OFA which morphed into our current national body, Orienteering Australia. In Orienteering Australia, he has been a Secretary, Director, chaired its Mapping Committee and been its Fixture Coordinator.
For all his work over decades, Dave has been recipient of high awards, such as the OFA Silva Award for Services to Orienteering in 1991, Lifetime Membership to ONSW, and has recently been inducted into Orienteering Australia’s Hall of Fame.
Some of Dave’s most important work has been in drawing maps for the sport of orienteering in this state. As a professional draftsman, he produced most of the early orienteering maps in NSW, drawing maps but also field-working them.
As an example of this work, all 14 versions of the map of Centennial Park in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs (now a permanent course) were produced by Dave! You can see a portion of his lovely Centennial Park map in the background of this website.
Read morePresented by Graham Gristwood, and produced by South London Orienteers, this is the start of a series of videos about orienteering which really helps illustrate what’s involved in orienteering.
Megan Carter-Davies of the Great Britain Orienteering Team talks about a key technique in orienteering – using attack points.
Attack points are big features near the control which you can be confident of finding. This is to make it easier to run really fast for most of each leg, and allowing you to slow down and be extra careful in just the last few meters to the control.
Ralph Street of the Orienteering Team of Great Britain, talks about using the technique of simplification, or finding the biggest, most obvious features in the terrain to help decide and secure your route.
Finding simple, unique features allows for faster running as the cognitive load is less with fewer visual cues to worry about.
Ralph talks too about using a more filtered view of contour lines, picking out which ones are showing which distinctive features and then ignoring the rest.
Great video!
This video is presented by Alice Leake of the GB Orienteering Team, about the critical skill of route choice.
Alice covers the way you can decide which route to take, covering the various factors of
Great way of showing the actual ground split-screen with the points on the map too! Neat!
Hector Haines, a member of the British Orienteering Team, demonstrates how to use a compass, first aligning it with your required route, then adjusting bevel lines to line up with north, then adjusting one’s orientation so you’re pointing in the right direction.
Chris Smithard, member of the Great Britain Orienteering Team, shows us how to use large contour features as guides or “handrails” to help us find controls faster.
