Looking after orienteering kit, most of which lives in a bog

• Magnets kill compasses, and magnets are everywhere now — The commonest cause of a reversed or sluggish needle, and it is entirely a modern problem: phone cases with magnetic mounts, wireless chargers, magnetic clasps on bags, speakers, and the magnets in laptop lids. A compass stored next to any of these can have its polarity weakened or reversed. Store it away from all of them, and never in the same pocket as a phone.
• Check it against a known bearing before an event, not during — Take two compasses, hold them apart, and see whether they agree. Or take a bearing on something whose direction you already know. Thirty seconds, and it catches the fault that would otherwise present as you being inexplicably 180 degrees wrong at control three.
• A bubble is usually temperature, and sometimes not — A small bubble that appears in cold or at altitude and disappears in the warm is normal and harmless — the fluid has contracted. A bubble that persists at room temperature, or grows, means the capsule seal has failed and fluid is escaping. That compass is on its way out and should be replaced before a race rather than after one.
• Rinse it, dry it, and do not leave it in the sun — Peat and grit scratch the baseplate until you cannot read through it, which matters on a thumb compass sitting on the map. Fresh water and a soft cloth. Prolonged UV degrades the plastic and can yellow the capsule.
• Elastic and cord are consumables — The wrist loop or thumb elastic perishes long before the compass does, and it always breaks at the moment you are running. Replace it when it loses its stretch rather than when it goes.

Orienteering shoes spend their working life soaked in bog water and full of organic matter, and then, characteristically, spend the following week in a plastic bag in a car boot. That week is what kills them.

• Rinse the same day, inside as well as out — A hose or a bucket. Getting peat and grit out matters more than getting them to look clean: grit inside the upper abrades the lining from the inside, which is where they usually fail first.
• Dry slowly, never on a radiator — Direct heat shrinks and hardens uppers and unglues soles. Newspaper stuffed inside, somewhere airy, laces out, tongue open. Two days rather than two hours.
• Never store them wet in a bag — This is the whole point of the section. A sealed bag with wet shoes and organic matter in it is a culture, and the smell that results does not come out. It also rots stitching.
• Check studs and the sole edge each time — Metal studs work loose and go missing, and a shoe with half its studs is worse than one with none because the grip is uneven. Sole separation starts as a small gap at the toe and is fixable with flexible adhesive if you catch it.
• Two pairs, alternated, last more than twice as long — Not a purchase this hobby demands, but the arithmetic is unusually favourable here, because most of the damage happens while wet rather than while running.

• Control description holder and map case — Rinse, dry flat. A scratched map case is a genuine handicap in rain, and they cost very little.
• The electronic punching card — Small, expensive to replace, and easy to lose because it lives on a wrist and comes off at download. Attach it to something. Rinse if it has been in mud, dry it, and keep it somewhere fixed between events rather than loose in a kit bag.
• Full leg cover, which is compulsory in woodland — Which means the kit that gets destroyed most is the cheapest — brambles shred lightweight leggings. Buy for repairability rather than performance, and expect them to be a consumable rather than an investment.
• The kit bag itself — Empty it after every event. The single habit that prevents most of the problems on this page, and the one nobody does.