Orienteering

You are given a detailed map, marked with a start, a sequence of numbered control points and a finish, and an electronic timing card. You visit the controls in order, punching each one, and your time is recorded. The route between controls is entirely your choice — that choice is the sport.

What makes it work is the map. Orienteering maps are surveyed specifically for the sport to an international specification, at scales around 1:10,000 or 1:15,000, and carry far more detail than a walking map: individual boulders, small depressions, changes in vegetation density, the runnability of the ground. Learning to read one is the skill.

The characteristic experience is making a decision under fatigue — round the hill on the path or straight over it through the trees — and finding out within four minutes whether you were right. It is the only endurance sport where slowing down to think is frequently the winning move.

Orienteering has an unusually clear ladder and an unusually gentle one: the colour-coded course system means you move up when you are ready and nothing forces you. What follows is roughly the order people actually go in.

• Up the colours, which is the whole first phase — The colour system is the progression. Moving from the shorter, path-based courses onto ones that require navigating through terrain rather than along features is the single biggest step in the sport, and it happens when you stop being able to hand-rail your way round. Most people spend a season or two here and it is not a formality.
• Joining a club, which changes the rate of improvement — The difference between somebody who turns up at events and somebody in a club is training and post-race analysis with people who ran the same course. Route choice is the skill that defines this sport and it is learnt fastest by comparing yours with three other people’s.
• Night orienteering — The same sport with the visual information removed, which turns out to sharpen everything. Compass work and pace counting stop being optional. It is also, unexpectedly, a very sociable branch.
• Longer and rougher: score events and multi-day — Score events replace a fixed course with a set of controls and a time limit, which makes planning the route the sport rather than executing it. Multi-day events add fatigue and an accumulated result, and they are where most people’s best orienteering memories come from.
• The disciplines that share the map — Mountain bike orienteering, ski orienteering and trail orienteering are separate disciplines rather than variants. Trail orienteering in particular is worth knowing about: it removes running speed from the result entirely and is competed on precision of map interpretation, which makes it one of the few genuinely equal-footing outdoor sports.
• Planning and controlling, which is where clubs need people — At some point most orienteers plan a course for somebody else. It is a real skill — a good course sets a sequence of interesting decisions rather than a hard route — and it teaches you more about your own racing than another season of competing.

1. 1

   Step 1: Find a local event and turn up — no membership needed

   British clubs run frequent local events open to non-members, with map hire and timing card included. There is no need to join anything to try it, and beginners are expected.

   You will know it worked when: You run a real course on your first day.

2. 2

   Step 2: Ask for the beginners’ briefing

   Almost every event has one, and it covers the map symbols, the control descriptions and how the timing card works. Five minutes of this replaces an hour of confusion.

   You will know it worked when: You understand what a brown circle on the map means before you are looking for it.

3. 3

   Step 3: Choose orange, and walk it

   Speed is worthless without accuracy, and the whole sport is built on the assumption that you will navigate at a pace you can think at. Walking is normal.

   You will know it worked when: You finish, having found every control.

4. 4

   Step 4: Learn to orient the map to the ground

   The foundational skill and the one beginners skip: turn the map, physically, so that north on the map points north on the ground and the features line up. Then the map reads directly. Most beginner mistakes come from reading an unoriented map.

   You will know it worked when: Left on the map is left in front of you.

5. 5

   Step 5: Learn thumbing and the attack point

   Thumb the map at your current position and move your thumb as you go, so you never have to re-find yourself. Choose an obvious feature near the control — a path junction, a pond, a distinct boulder — navigate confidently to that, and only then navigate carefully into the control.

   You will know it worked when: You stop wandering in circles fifty metres from the flag.

Almost nothing is required, which is unusual for a competitive sport. In rough order of when it becomes worth buying:

• Full leg cover — Required at most events, and not a formality — bramble, bracken and heather at running speed cut badly. Old tracksuit bottoms work; purpose-made orienteering trousers are lighter and shed water.
• A whistle — Mandatory at many events. It is the mechanism by which somebody injured out of sight of a path is found.
• A thumb compass — £20–£40. Worn on the thumb alongside the map, used mainly to orient the map quickly rather than to take precise bearings. Becomes genuinely useful from light green upwards.
• Orienteering shoes — £70–£110, with metal or rubber studs and a stiff sole. The single biggest comfort and safety upgrade for anyone running rather than walking, because they grip wet rock, roots and steep grass that trail shoes slide off.
• A map case or a control-description holder — Maps are printed on waterproof paper at most events, so a case is optional; a wrist holder for the control descriptions is cheap and stops you unfolding the map to read them.
• Your own timing card — £30–£50 once you are attending regularly, and it saves the hire fee within a season. Until then, event hire is included in the entry.

• Full leg cover — Required at most events. Bramble, bracken and heather at running speed cut badly.
• Ticks — Common in exactly the terrain orienteering uses. Check afterwards.
• Weather — Upland events can be genuinely serious in winter, and organisers may specify mandatory kit. Follow it.
• Ankles — Uneven ground under vegetation you cannot see through is the commonest injury mechanism. Studded shoes and a slower pace in rough ground both help.

The colour convention, which is standardised internationally and is not the same as an Ordnance Survey map:

• White — Runnable forest. Counterintuitively, white means open woodland you can move through freely — not open ground.
• Yellow — Open land — fields, clearings, moor.
• Green — Vegetation that slows you down. Darker green means slower; the darkest is effectively impassable.
• Brown — Landforms — contours, knolls, depressions, earth banks.
• Blue — Water — streams, ponds, marsh.
• Black — Rock, and man-made features — paths, walls, fences, buildings, boulders.
• Purple / magenta — The course itself — start triangle, control circles, finish, and out-of-bounds areas.

Control descriptions are given as a table of international pictorial symbols rather than words, so that they work in any language: which feature the control is on, which side of it, and its size. Learning the twenty or so common symbols removes most of the remaining friction.

Contours are the part beginners under-use and experts rely on. Vegetation changes with the season and with forestry work; landform does not. An orienteer navigating by contours is navigating by the one thing the map is guaranteed to have got right.

British events offer several courses at once, graded by technical difficulty and length. You choose your own. The colours are national conventions and are the single most useful thing for a newcomer to understand.

For an adult beginner, orange is usually the right choice: yellow is often too simple to be interesting, and light green punishes an error with a long search.

Alongside the colours, British Orienteering grades technical difficulty separately on a five-point scale — TD1 very easy, TD2 easy, TD3 medium, TD4 more technical, TD5 difficult. This is the more precise instrument, and it is what makes the top three colours legible: green, blue and brown are all at the hardest navigational grade and differ principally in length and physical demand, so moving from green to blue is a fitness step rather than a navigation one.

Course gradings and their names are set by the national governing body and are consistent between clubs, which is what allows you to attend an event anywhere and know what you are getting.

• Long distance — The classic format: a long course in forest or moorland, where route choice between controls is the whole event. Physically the hardest and the one where a good runner can lose to a good navigator.
• Middle distance — Shorter, denser and more technical, with controls close enough together that there is little time to recover from a mistake. Widely considered the purest test of the navigation itself.
• Sprint — In parks, campuses and town centres, at speed, on a map with its own symbol set where the crucial information is which walls and fences you may pass. Almost a different sport, and the most spectator-friendly.
• Score events — Any order, as many controls as you can reach inside a time limit, points for each and a penalty for being late. The most welcoming format for newcomers because you cannot be lost in the sense that matters — you simply score less.
• Night orienteering — The same courses in darkness, where the visible world shrinks to a headtorch beam and features have to be trusted rather than seen. A substantial part of the British winter league season.
• Relay and team events — Legs run in sequence, often with courses shuffled between team members so nobody can simply follow. The format club culture is built around.
• Trail orienteering — Precision map interpretation from a viewpoint, with no running and no time pressure on the decision. Designed so that physical ability is not the differentiator, and the discipline in which disabled and non-disabled competitors compete directly against each other.
• Mountain bike and ski orienteering — The same navigation with route choice constrained to a track network, on a bike or on skis. MTB orienteering has a small but active British scene; ski orienteering effectively does not, for the obvious reason.

Nothing about an orienteering event is designed to look welcoming from the car park. There is a registration tent, some string, and people vanishing into trees one at a time. What is actually happening is a sport organised on the assumption that a complete stranger will turn up, and almost every convention below exists to make that work.

• You genuinely can just turn up — Colour-coded courses mean an event caters for every level on the same afternoon: White, Yellow and Orange are, in the federation’s own words, "designed for complete beginners", short and on or near paths, while green, blue, brown and black "get harder and longer and are only recommended if you have some experience". Nobody will stop you entering the wrong one, and everybody will advise you against it if you ask.
• Going alone is normal, and so is not going alone — The newcomers’ guidance is explicit that "you can go individually or in a very small group". Two people walking a White course together is completely ordinary and nobody regards it as cheating on a beginners’ course.
• Download is a safety register, not admin — The most important convention in the sport and the one nobody explains. After finishing you must go to Download to register the fact that you are back safely. If you retire, get lost, or go home without finishing, you still go to Download — otherwise the organisers believe there is somebody in the wood at dusk, and they will start looking. Walking off to your car without downloading is the one thing that will genuinely annoy an event official.
• Silence in the start lanes, and no following — Courses are shuffled deliberately so that following somebody does not work, and the start is run as timed boxes so nobody sees your map before their own start. Talking about a course to somebody who has not yet run it is the sport’s cardinal sin, and it is committed almost entirely by accident.
• Full leg cover, and nobody will make an exception — Compulsory at woodland and forest events. It is a brambles-and-ticks rule rather than a uniform rule, and it is enforced at registration.
• The results are public and everybody looks at the splits — Electronic punching produces a time at every control, so after an event you can see exactly which leg cost you four minutes — and so can everybody else. This sounds brutal and is the opposite: it turns "I was slow" into "I lost 3:40 on control 6", which is a thing you can fix. Comparing splits with a stranger in the car park afterwards is the closest this sport has to a social ritual.

The volunteer economy underneath it is worth understanding, because it explains the tone. Events are put on by clubs, planned and controlled by members, with families hanging kites in a wood at seven in the morning for somebody else’s Saturday. Nobody is paid. The expectation, once you have been to a few, is that you will eventually help — and the ask is usually gentle, specific, and impossible to refuse.