Author: PJ
Orienteering – Finish Procedures
When you finish a course, you need to punch the finish control and go the the Finish desk and download your time.
Using the info from your SI stick, the official at the Finish desk can determine that you’ve done the correct controls in order and give you your time and ranking.
Feel free to mill around and have a chat with the other competitors afterwards and compare notes and routes!
Read moreOrienteering – How To Read The Map
Map reading is the defining mental challenge of orienteering. You generally follow a numbered course, connected with red lines to denote fastest route as the crow flies.
Understanding the symbols is key. Guides help understand the specialised symbols involved. Look to the Learning Orienteering map page for explanations and guides to reading maps and the meanings of their symbols.
Read moreOrienteering – How To Get Ready: Registration
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 moreOrienteering – How To Get Ready For Your Start
After 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 moreOrienteering – How To Use The Compass
Make 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 moreOrienteering – How To Speed Up Through Checkpoints
Not 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 moreRoute Choice in Orienteering
When 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 more10 Mila Relay
The 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 moreCourse d’Orientation:CNE et France de Sprint 2015
In 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 moreJukola Relay
The 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 moreScottish Six Days
The 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 moreWorld Orienteering Championships
The 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 moreDave Lotty
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 moreA Newcomer’s Guide to Orienteering
Presented 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.
Credits:
- Filming: Katherine Bett
- Editing: Katherine Bett
- Producer: Sarah Brown
- Music: Alasdair Parkinson
- SLOW: http://slow.org.uk/
- On the Red Line: https://www.ontheredline.org.uk/
- British Orienteering: https://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/
Attack Points
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.
Credits:
- Filming: Katherine Bett
- Editing: Katherine Bett
- Producer: Sarah Brown
- Music: Alasdair Parkinson
- SLOW: http://slow.org.uk/
- On the Red Line: https://www.ontheredline.org.uk/
- British Orienteering: https://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/
Simplification
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!
Credits:
- Filming: Katherine Bett
- Editing: Katherine Bett
- Producer: Sarah Brown
- Music: Alasdair Parkinson
- SLOW: http://slow.org.uk/
- On the Red Line: https://www.ontheredline.org.uk/
- British Orienteering: https://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/