There is an adventure race coming to town in February that a bunch of my friends are participating in but I’m concerned about my orientiering skills and the last thing I want is to be rescued from the middle of nowhere because I can’t read a map. I’m not sure if I can’t do the orientiering part because I’ve never done it. My question to ST is, how difficult is this orientiering? Do any of you participate in adventure races?
It all depends on the race. Some adventure races have very easy navigation that really doesn’t require any “real” orienteering, but others can be very difficult. Things that can make it very difficult are racing at night, large open water, big forest, etc… It’s very easy to learn the basics though and the only way to get better is to try it. I would contact the race director and find out what the difficulty level is expected to be.
Look for a local orienteering club. We are spoiled here in the San Francisco Area because we have the Bay Area Orienteering Club that holds about 20 events per year. The people in orienteering clubs are generally very nice to newcomers and willing the show you how to do it. You may also want to pick up the Boy Scout Merit Badge pahphlet for Orienteering MB. It will be an easy read. Ask the RD if they will be providing maps that are oriented to true north or magnetic North. It may help you prepare.
Don’t worry, you will do fine, just bring the required items and if you get lost at least you will be warm and not hungry. Then we will all have a good laugh at your expense and offer to take you on our next snipe hunt. Just kidding, it’s a fun sport. I’ve done four races, took third place in the solo division at one here in the East Bay last summer. If you get the bug, make a vacation out of it and come to California at the end of the summer for the Big Blue Adventure Race. Lake Tahoe is the best venue I’ve yet to race in.
Cheers, Karma
I’ve done the two longest adventure races in the world: Raid Gauloise Vietnam and Discovery Channel Eco Challenge in British Columbia. I’ve also been to four (I think…) land navigation schools in the military.
Orienteering and navigating by terrain association is something that comes with practice. Once you are good, you can navigate in the desert or the jungle at night with just a compass and your pace count beads.
Learning land Nav is not difficult, and I think the current generation of full-feature GPS’s are an excellent learning tool too. But the key is to be able to read a map well and know how to use your compass.
The key skills are learning to orient your map with the surrounding terrain and learning how to walk pace count and stay on bearing, especially in wooded terrain or thick brush or jungle.
An excellent, must read is: Be Expert With Map and Compass.
the Amazon.com link:
Check this one out. Good luck! I think you will find Land Nav is cool.
Don’t reconsider not doing the adventure race because of the orienteering - That’s half the fun! You won’t be the only one with no idea in that discipline. It’s great teamwork and gets the brain ticking over, always a challenge when fatigued. Practice, practice and more practice in varied conditions is the only way to master orienteering.
I’ve had many funny experiences with team mates in ARs. The four man teams are most probably more difficult as each person cluelessly points to a different point of the compass. At least with only three in the team, we have a high degree of confidence the correct direction is the point on the compass no one has claimed!
land nav with a compass and map is pretty easy to use. reading and being used to terrain off a map takes a good bit of practice and figuring out your straight line distance when you need to go up, over, and around things takes a lot of practice. You might get lost but you’ll have fun doing it.
Usually the orienteering parts are made quite easy, as they want to attract, not scare away, entrants. Orienteering is not that difficult, the basics of it at least. Buy a compass, do a google serach on Orienteering, and go play in a local park for a few hours. Then go do the race, and have fun.
Hmmm, after looking at the race site, what you need to do is find a teammate who is at least mildly experienced at orientering, and go practice with him or her.
“Do any of you participate in Adventure Races?”
That’s actually how I found ST. I was looking for nutrition ideas that IM competitors use, so I could apply it to AR.
“O” can be extremely difficult or extremely easy. Depends on the course and the map. Sometimes you’re in thick woods that are relatively flat, and your map has the trails eliminated on it, and you lose 30 minutes in the blink of an eye. Other times you don’t even break out your compass ‘cause the placements are too easy.
The key is to do it with someone else in an AR if you’re not that strong in that discipline. Racing solo it is easy since the team won’t be trying to drop you by sprinting everywhere (you’re not racing against each other). Use them as a double check of your bearing. The best thing would be to just race with an experienced teammate.
Some suggestions. Racing solo: find another team to double check what you’re doing. Stick with them through the course if they are at your pace. Racing two-man: both people carry a compass, one primary bearing man, one primary distance man (who still checks bearing). Racing three-man: Two bearing people, one primary distance man. Racing four-man, Two bearing people, one distance man, one person to remind you to eat, tracks time, looks out for other teams, shouts encouragement, etc. Before your first race, definitely hook up with an “O” club. In WI we can do events for, like, $7.
Tom D’s book suggestion is really good.
Burns
ditto what a lot of people said, and i’ll add a couple of items to take to your race if you have to prepare your own map…
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yardstick or other long edge; you often have to add gridlines to the race maps provided and you want to be accurate
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plotting tool (learn how to do this prior - plotting UTMs is easy, but you don’t want race day to be your first try)
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different colored pens or highlighters for marking checkpoints so you can see them on the map
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flat surface (top of car may work) for drawing all this out
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map case or ziplock for easy map reference while you’re out there
have FUN!
~geek