How To Orienteer

This is intended as a quick guide to orienteering for the novice or inexperienced orienteer, some of the techniques mentioned are not needed for a first event and are included for completeness. Anybody in the club will be happy to explain further any of the techniques mentioned here.

Quick Links

Introduction And Courses
Orientating The Map
Map Scale
Taking Compass Bearings
Aiming Off
Pace Counting
Attack Points And Catching Features

The picture on the right is a small section of an orienteering map (From the BUSA Relays 2000 Mens course), the triangle near the centre represents the start and the circles represent each control point (number 1 can be seen in the bottom left hand corner), The double circle represents the finish.

The main difference between a 'normal' map and an orienteering map (o-map) is the colour coding, on an o-map the forest areas will be shown in white if it is open forest and the colour will change from light green through to dark green as the forest becomes less 'runnable', open land is typically different shades of yellow depending how open the open land is.

After arriving at an event the first thing that you must decide is what course to run. There are two types of events:

• Badge Events - these tend to be national level events
• Colour Coded Events - these are more local events

Badge events are entered by age class with the choice between a short or long course so are relatively simple except for the rather bizarre age class system; your orienteering age is the age you be at the end of the year you want to compete, the main age classes for university students are M/W20 and M/W21 M and W are male and female respectively, the M20 class covers everybody from 18 to 20 and the W21 cover people from 21 to 35, for example if you were 23, male and wanted to run a long course you would enter M21L.

At Colour Coded events you can choose what course to enter and they are all named after colours

Note: distances of orienteering courses are measured as the straight-line distance between each pair of points. As a result, the actual distance you will cover will be greater than this, because your route will deviate from these straight lines to avoid obstacles like hills or thick forest, or to stick to easily-navigable terrain like paths and tracks. A good rule of thumb is to add another third to the distance: so if a course is reported as 3km, you will probably cover around 4km of distance.

After registering to run a particular course you will be given a control description and a control card. The control description tells you what sort of feature each control will be on (eg. Path junction, Boulder etc.) and a unique number to identify the control so that you know you have reached the right point, the control card contains a set of numbered boxes, at each control there will be a 'punch' this is a stapler type device that has instead of staples a set of pins set in a particular pattern, this is used to punch a hole in your control car to prove that you have visited the control.

We will now skip to the start, if you are at a badge event you probably do not have a map yet but do not worry you will get a nice marked-up map when you start, if you are at a colour coded event you will probably have a blank map at the moment. In colour coded event you have to mark the course onto the map yourself, to do this you will probably need to bring a pen (red is the normal choice - it is the only colour that is not used on the map), after you start there will be a set of 'master maps' about 10m away from the start for you to copy the course from, this is part of the competition but do not rush this part because if you draw a control in the wrong place on your map it will take you a very long time to find it on the ground! So you now have a fully marked up map, what do you do next?

Orientating The Map

This is probably the most important skill for orienteering, if the map is correctly aligned with the ground you can never go wrong (in theory!)

On the section of map above you can just about see a series of continuos thin black lines running vertically up and down the map, these lines run north-south (magnetic) with the top of the map north. If you take a compass and turn the map until these lines match the direction of the needle in the compass (red end north) your map will be properly aligned. You will now know which way to turn when reaching path junctions etc.

The Map Scale

There are two main map scales for orienteering 1:10000 - 10mm on the map is 100m on the ground and 1:15000 - 10mm on the map is 150m on the ground. The distance between contours is 5m.

Compass Bearings

A bearing is used when you want to get from one point to another in a straight line when there is nothing in-between.

To take a bearing, follow these directions:

1. Place the compass on the map.
2. Point the compass in the direction you want to travel
3. Holding the compass in place, rotate the housing until the gridlines on the base of the housing line up with the magnetic north grid on the map
4. Remove the compass from the map and hold it flat such that the compass needle lines up with the gridlines in the housing
5. The direction of travel arrow will now point in the direction you should go.

To take accurate bearings you should pick an object like a tree in the 'near distance' and run towards it, and when you get there stop and pick another object and do the same. This will help to eliminate any error caused by running around things. (This technique is more difficult in low-visibility terrain like forest.)

Aiming Off

It is very unlikely that when traveling on a bearing you will get to exactly the right point, and if you miss which side of the point where you want to be are you; so there is a technique called aiming off. If you are traveling towards a feature such as a path, fence, stream, spur, re-entrant or some other longish feature you should pick a point either to the left or the right of what you are aiming for, then when you reach you stream for example and even if you have drifted to one side or the other you will know which way to turn.

Pace Counting

This is a slightly more advanced technique that enables you to judge distance. The idea is that you know how many double paces it take you to cover 100m in different terrain, you can then use this information to work out how far you have gone. I count each time my left leg hits the floor and know that on open ground I will do 34 paces to 100m. Obviously before you can pace count you must measure your paces.

Attack Point And Catching Features

If you are looking for a control that is a little bit in the middle of nowhere you need to find someway of making it a bit easier, especially if the feature you are looking for is quite small. To do this you would pick a larger feature that is reasonably close to the control and easier to find, you can then use this to 'attack' the control. Good attack points are things like path junctions, stream junctions, corners in fences, big contour features and very distinct vegetation changes

A catching feature is something quite obvious that you can use if you go to far, it should be something that if you come to you can say 'oops I've gone past the control' and then turn around and go back. Good catching features are paths, streams, fences, spurs, re-entrants.