It’s a tough sell. Convincing people that there is more to orienteering than just “picking up a compass, getting a bearing (azimuth) from a map, and going” is tough.
Many people are so engrained with the idea gained from scout training or military training that all you have to learn is to follow that bearing, and you will have mastered orienteering.
No. Competitive orienteering takes a lot more and gives much more in return.
It’s all about route choices, making and carrying out those choices as quickly as possible. And, as the writer I’m going to point you to says, it is about knowing and accounting for your strengths and weaknesses as you make those choices.
Making the choices: Anyone who has taken personal life management courses, leadership courses, and problem-solving courses will know that the processes of decision-making, problem-solving, etc., involve collecting information, selecting the relevant information, analyzing the information, making a decision based on the analysis, then carrying out the decision and making adjustments as necessary.
That’s the key to success in life’s decisions. It is also the key to success in orienteering, and the process is reinforced time after time as we go from control point to control point in our orienteering races.
Let’s look at this example. It is the 9th leg of the Green (Advanced) Female course at our Gold Head Branch State Park event on November 18, 2023.
The route choices can be classified largely on three choices: left to a road intersection, then follow the road until leaving it to ‘attack’ the control point, right with the same process with more trail and road running to the attack point or straight through the woods, the shortest route could be risky, but it was ‘framed’ by the roads and campground acting as effective handrails.
Which route was faster? The Livelox leg-by-leg replay color-codes the times for us. Green times were the fastest, Yellow was the second fastest group, and the Red group took the longest times. Yellow runners tended to have the shortest distances, but Green covered their distance in less time.
Review the Livelox tracks for the Green Female course.
That is an effective route choice.
Did you find that interesting? Please take a look at this link. https://confident-orienteering.blogspot.com/p/routes-analiysis-of-leg-9-of-norwegian.html. The writer, Aleksandr Alekseyonok of Poland, is passionate about orienteering, the intricacies of route choices, and the whys and hows of making them.
Suppose you are an orienteering coach who wants to move the team past the stage of surviving the course to where they can be in the top part of the results and often win the day. In that case, analysis of Livelox results and keeping up on the science of route choice are terrific ways to sharpen skill levels when forest training is unavailable.
Gord Hunter