Some moderate-level guides to better orienteering from South London Orienteers, UK, and narrated by members of the Great Britain Orienteering Team.
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.
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.
Kris Jones, of the Great Britain Orienteering Team, explains how to read detailed contours on a map.
His overarching point is that you can often ignore a lot of the detail and focus on just the most characteristic features shown on the map to guide you.
Charlotte Watson, member of the Great British Orienteering team, shows how to using aiming off as a technique to find controls faster and with more confidence.
The idea is you use aiming off to go deliberately left or right of a control on a line feature so you can have more surety of the control’s position. Just watch her and see how it works.
Charlotte Ward explains how to orientate the map during a race relative to the surrounding features and the north lines on the map (with the aid of the compass).
She talks about resetting the map at each control and constantly checking to maintain continuous contact with the orientation of the map to make better, faster decisions.
