In the section we look at a Tool Kit of skills you can use to navigate effectively and some strategies to help put them in to practice. (see further down the page)

Once you have a rock solid Basic Navigation Routine, you will want to think about how to save time and how to avoid making errors under pressure. To do this you can extend the range of skills Concepts that you are confident of executing reliably and you can develop Strategies to cope with common errors and minimise the chances of them losing you a lot of time.

You can then approach a course confident in having a solid basic technique and a toolbox of concepts that you can apply as necessary. The strategies in this section are to help you maximise your chances of being able to use those tools effectively.

It may also help to look at the section How well am I orienteering? to think about where you are in your orienteering development.

Skills Tool Kit

The Skills Tool Kit Visual Summary includes simplified diagrams to show the basics of what a range of core skills entail, along with map extracts to illustrate these skills in practice. These skills operate at every level of orienteering with varying levels of complexity. You can mix and match and adapt these skills concepts flexibly as needed. The map extracts were kindly provided by Martin Bagness, all annotation is by Duncan Bayliss.

The Skills Tool Kit scan be downloaded as a stand alone pdf it is also included in the Better Orienteering Summary (see further below)

This video Compass bearing and Attack Point on an Orange course (No.13 in playlist) by Simon Eklov (O-Ringen TV) and Viktor Janrick, demonstrates using the compass to cut across between paths, rather than having to follow line features all the way, and then using a firm Attack Point to locate the control. (Swedish with English sub-titles).

The following schematic diagram, Route choice and executing a leg, captures a lot of the thought processes in navigating a leg. It combines strategies to employ such as identifying an Attack Point and Corridor to move through, with a series of processes you need to undertake throughout the leg.

The purple circles are indicative of a sense of the level of certainty you will need of your exact location at varying points through a leg – in the same way that a circle on a smartphone or GPS changes size depending on how certain it is of your location.

With Route Choice option A, following a Hand Rail, the purple circles are small indicating that you could know with a high degree of certainty where you are when on a path.

With Route Choice option B, moving through a Corridor of features you might have less certainty of your exact location but be confident of where you are going, heading for a Catching Feature and the circle placing you is larger.

The permutations of skills and processes for different legs are endless, so you will need to follow a Basic Navigation Routine and then flexibly draw from a Tool Kit of Skills as needed on route.

The orange, green and red runner symbols remind you to consider the appropriate speed for different parts of a leg and the navigation challenges they present and to think of the leg in sections – red= slow, orange = moderate speed, green = faster. Remember some legs are best taken slowly all the way between controls. Some other legs allow a section of much faster progress.

Better Orienteering Summary

You can also download the Skills Tool Kit as part of a larger Better Orienteering Summary. It links back to this website and has all the key graphics.

Using the Skills Tool Kit in practice

These three suggestions for successful orienteering from Thierry Gueorgiou (multiple World Champion), sum up much of what you need to aim for. This page is reproduced with permission from Göran Andersson’s book ‘Cool, Awesome and Educational Orienteering at school ages 6-15’

see http://www.byorienteering.se/ for how to order copies.

Read the book for free at Issuu.com

The advice is relevant for orienteers of all ages and all abilities.

Plan Picture Direction

There is a lot to remember when orienteering. Plan, Picture, Direction provides a simple model, used throughout Better Orienteering, to help you draw together all the elements we have been looking at. The model is summarised as Plan, Picture Direction to make it easy to remember.

Plan – read the map to work out a route and Attack point

Picture – visualise what you will encounter on route

Direction – follow a routine with map and compass to navigate the leg

Seeing – what you see in the terrain will need to be matched to your Picture of what you expect to see. You then keep updating the details of your Plan and Picture

Plan Picture Direction in more detail

For Plan, Picture, Direction to make sense you will need to systematically think through those steps. With practice this process becomes more automatic and you won’t need to directly ask yourself these questions every leg of every course. The thought process should become a habit and occasionally saying “Plan, Picture, Direction” to yourself will be all the reminder you need.

So, to try this out in training, ask your self these questions for each leg (e.g. 1 to 2, 2 to 3 etc):

Plan

Plan? – Do I have a Plan that includes an Attack Point, and a route that I can execute reliably? Have I used ideas such as Aiming Off to avoid potential errors? Is there a Catching Feature that will stop me just before the control, or afterwards if I miss it? What Notable features will I see on route that I can ‘tick off’ (collect) as I pass them? How can I Simplify this to a clear Mental map in my mind?

Map – Zoom – when you look at the map first, you are looking at the leg overall

Picture

Picture? – Can I turn the Plan, a simplified Mental Map of the route, into a Picture of the terrain and route in my mind? How will the shape of the land guide me? How can I use it to navigate? Also, very importantly, what will the control site look like? What feature is it on? Which direction will it be visible from?

Map – As you move through the leg you Zoom in and out on detail as needed.

Direction

Direction? – What is the overall Direction I will take? Do I need an accurate compass bearing for any part of the leg? At what features will I check my Direction? How will I use the compass with the map to maintain accurate Direction?

Map – Keep updating information from the map.

Seeing? – As you move through the leg, ideally you will have already pictured in your mind what you will be Seeing in the terrain and it will fit your Picture confirming that you are on route heading accurately in the right direction. However, that takes a lot of practice and the reality is that we need to keep taking account of what we are Seeing to check it against our Picture and Plan so that we can keep to the right Direction.

Map – Keep looking at the map frequently with different levels of Zoom in your map reading, focusing in and out of details or overview as needed as you progress through the leg. As well as looking at the map often, keep your head up Seeing the terrain around you all the time.

Relocation? – If what you are Seeing in the terrain is no longer matching your Picture and Plan, stop and start Relocating. Don’t just keep going hoping it will work out. It is the map that will relocate you. Check – are you interpreting the map correctly? Are you visualising the shape of the land and notable features accurately?

Often you can relocate quickly. It may be that you just needed to look at the map again and Zoom in on more detail and relate it to where you are, or Zoom out and see the bigger picture to locate you, and then move on again. Looking at the map frequently helps you keep your Picture updated and your Direction accurate. Whilst at the highest levels of orienteering the aim is to hardly ever stop still, be realistic about your ability. If you need to stop and spend 5 seconds confirming where you are, it is much better than 5 minutes relocating later.

Plan, Picture, Direction and hopefully minimal Relocation – Try it!

(This model is considered again in more detail in the Advanced section)

A bit more on Picture

Try to not just Picture features such as paths and streams, try to Picture or visualise the shape of the terrain. The better you get at picturing the shape of the land, the easier orienteering gets. Use the contours and other features that confirm them such as streams and lakes which are in valleys. It is then much easier to make good route choices and to navigate well on route. You should aim to always know what sort of slope you are on, e.g. how steep is it and which way does it slope?

Visualisations using 3DRerun help show how important it is to Picture the shape of the land. What you picture in your mind won’t look exactly like this, but you should be able to identify the main shapes and how steep they are. This great example from World of O Route to 2020 Day 27, by Jan Kocbach illustrates this very well.

The leg this illustrates is here:

Visit the World of O Route to 2020 series for more route choice challenges and analysis of competitors route choices. Once you start to read on World of O you may be there a long time!

Visualisation is discussed again in later sections.

More about Relocation

Relocation, map reading and visualisation

A one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate for relocation. Most discussion of relocation talks about it as though the way you relocate will be the same after 5+ years experience as it would be for a beginner but that is not true. You can relocate like a beginner even when you have been orienteering a long time but it is not efficient or quick.

Relocation means different things in different situations from a small drift off line, to a situation where you have no idea where you are.

So, it is worth looking at how map reading changes as skills progress, and how that interacts with visualisation (or picturing) and then relocation. In simple terms, the better you are reading the map and visualising from it, the easier and faster it is to relocate. It also makes it less likely that you will go very wrong in the first place.

It is important to remember that these descriptions are not saying what you must do at different skill levels.  They are just a description of how people tend to navigate at those levels. The sooner you can move on up the levels the better, which is why Better Orienteering talks about Plan, Picture, Direction at all levels from Beginner to Advanced.

What follows is some description of how people tend to interact with the map at different stages of skills development, accompanied by a summary of how relocation typically works at that skill level. The types of approach that work best for beginners are more time consuming but easier to do than the types of approach that work for elite competitors. However, even if your orienteering is at an Advanced level, if your attempts at relocation don’t work then you end up having to fall back on the approaches that worked at a lower skill level.

The stages of map reading and relocating set out here are really part of a continuum, rather than totally distinct stages.

If you are lost or unsure of where you are, the strategies that do not work are:

– Keeping going and hoping it will work out –  the error just gets bigger

– Wandering aimlessly in circles, hoping to find something

– Standing still for too long if you can’t make sense of the map.  Develop a plan and then move.  Orienteering maps often make more sense as you move.  If you observe the terrain carefully as you move then features may become clearer as your position changes.

What you need really need is a Relocation strategy that fits your skill level.

Beginner map reading and relocation

The Beginner is puzzling out the map and terrain and asking:

Where am I?

Basic map reading and relocation

At a Basic level you should check off features you pass and you are often asking:

Where have I been? but also, What do I do now?

Intermediate navigation and relocation

At an Intermediate level you are Picturing better and focusing on:

Where am I going?

At an Intermediate level compared to Basic Navigation you will consider more options.  You may be able to safely continue to a catching feature if you know roughly where you are and it would be quicker than spending too much time working out your position where you are standing.  It may help to identify another large feature to move out to.

Advanced map reading, visualising and relocation

At an Advanced level you are Picturing or Visualizing well ahead and asking:

Where am I going next? (see the next sections, Advanced skills and Beyond Advanced, for more detail).

By “Where am I going next?” I mean not what is just the next thing you will see, but what is coming after that and then after that as well. And the next Check Point or Notable Feature on route and what comes after the control, and so on. It is all pictured further in front of you before you see it e.g. Where will I be in 200 metres time? (As Thierry Gueorgiou puts it).

At an Advanced level, you should know what area of the map you are within – think of it as a circle of no more than 200 metres diameter. Stopping and adding more detail should be enough to reconfirm your position.  Be disciplined and don’t let the error build to the point where stopping and detailing is not enough!

Summing up on relocation

The better your visualisation in the first place, the easier it is to relocate

As your skills improve the time taken to relocate should reduce. The slowest relocation strategy is re-tracing your steps. Reviewing where you have been from the last known point takes time because it requires you to stand still and think back over what you have seen.

If your Picture of your intended route is strong and you are aware of where you are in that visualisation as you move, then you can catch errors before they become large.  Stopping to add more detail is often enough to relocate yourself.

At an Advanced level, if your visualisation is very good you may be able to continue to move towards the next notable feature you planned to see, aware of how you may have drifted off line and how far you have gone. However, continuing to move without knowing your exact location should only be done when you know for certain that you are within a clearly identified section of the map because you can loose a lot of time by drifting a long way off route

If you are disciplined and visualising well, then relocation becomes a process of constant adjustment by adding detail to your visualisation

Remember – No matter how long you have been orienteering, or how good you think you are – When the map is not matching the terrain STOP and let your brain catch up with your location!

This discussion of map reading and visualisation has included insights from Martin Lerjen and Michel Guergiou. See the Beyond Advanced section for more detail or Further articles on skills for links.

Strategies to use your Tool Kit of skills effectively

It is important that you also understand a range of strategies to employ so that you can join these skills up and use them in practice. Orienteering is much more than just knowing a range of navigation skills.

We will now review a range of Strategies or approaches you can take, and relate them to skills concepts they can work with. We are building a set of ideas that will help you join those skills up effectively. That is why this website does not just list skills one by one. Then we return to a range of ways to practice your skills including games, simulations, route planning activities and analysis.

 

It is easy to lose time but very difficult to make it up

Your best chance of speeding up is to minimise loses and aggregate small gains.

For example, it is easy to lose 10 seconds a leg by stopping too much.  With 15 legs on a course that is 2.5 minutes.

If you have good Control Flow minimising stopping at each control you can easily save another 5 to 10 seconds per control or more.  That results in another potential 2.5 minutes.  However, Control Flow can be very hard to master.

Thus, smooth technique can save 5 minutes in 15 controls.  It takes a leap in fitness to run that much faster.

Everybody makes mistakes all the time

GPS traces have transformed orienteering analysis.   See:

World of O    and

Routegadget  

It is very revealing to see how the best orienteers take different routes on legs and how sometimes it makes little difference, whereas other times it is critical.  They also vary their speed to match the terrain.  Examining a Men’s World Championships Long course GPS traces, it was instructive to see the eventual winner slowing to a slow jog for the last 200 metres into a difficult control where others made the biggest time loses.  The fastest route involved going straight but with a lot of opportunity to mess up near the control.  It takes a lot of discipline to back right off the speed knowing that the time lost is nothing compared to the potential losses from a mistake. A World Championship was won or lost on knowing when to back off and be certain of getting difficult navigation right.  Playing the percentages well, delivers results.

If you are running fit then it can be important to hold back in a controlled way knowing you could be going faster, but also knowing that speeding up will force errors and lose more time overall.

Anticipate errors and enjoy continually relocating

The more experience you have the better you get at anticipating errors of what is likely to go wrong with a leg.  You can then plan accordingly.  For example, Aiming Off to the side of a control or to a visible Attack Point, can be about anticipating drift on a bearing or on a slope and thus ensuring you know which way you will have drifted. 

Expect to have to continually relocate yourself so that you can remain on course overall.  Relocation from big mistakes should be easier if you are constantly placing yourself within a small area of map within which you are navigating and relocating on a finer basis.  Accepting relocation on a small scale and a larger scale as part of what orienteering is and getting good at it will make a huge contribution to your overall speed.  A positive attitude to relocation frees up thinking space to continue to navigate well.

Try this SLOW video on Aiming Off. Aiming off is part of a strategy to avoid catastrophic relocation and executing it well at speed often involves small scale relocation to pull it off.

The video link below takes you to the YouTube Playlist for the Get Up To Speed videos. Select 5/9 Aiming Off from the playlist.

Get Up to Speed video series

Treat every leg as a new beginning

During a race, don’t stress about mistakes, forget them and move on. Don’t let them affect how you approach the next leg, otherwise one mistake leads to rushing or frustration.  Just like rushing, frustration kills Flow and more mistakes follow.  Even in the highest level of competition, the winner will be able to identify time losses, but they will have responded to them calmly and moved straight on to focusing on the next leg.  You don’t have the mental capacity to be reviewing a mistake at the same time as successfully facing the next leg’s challenges.  The time to think about mistakes is after the run.

You cannot afford to respond emotionally to mistakes as having done something “wrong”.  Continual small mistakes are what orienteering is all about and learning to be happy about them and be pleased for relocating from them, speeds you up a lot and frees up mental space for the next navigation task. Unhelpful emotions such as a fright or flight response to danger, shut down our thinking to tunnel vision. Helpful emotions free us up to be the pianist in a concert hall playing a Beethoven piano concerto, or to be the runner who emerges from the forest with a class win. 

Ignore other people and never talk

Responding to other people’s presence modifies our behaviour in almost all situations.  In orienteering it leads to rushing and mistakes such as getting pulled off line.  Be aware of others potentially coming out of a control for example, but have it as a background awareness, and still navigate in to the control yourself.  It is incredibly easy to be distracted.  You do not know how someone else is doing in the race until the results, what you see in the forest usually tells you nothing.  Talking breaks your concentration and others concentration too, by breaking your flow of navigation thinking and nearly always causes errors.  Navigation under oxygen debt will be taking up 100% of your cognitive abilities, you literally do not have the spare capacity to talk.

I remember feeling very unfit when I saw another competitor still running on a very steep hill high up in the Pyrenees when I was walking (briskly), but I knew that if I ran it would blow my chances later in the course, so I ignored the urge to try to also run.  It turned out that he won M21E and went on to also win M21E at the Swedish O-ringen (a week-long Orienteering competition each summer) in the same year.  He was one of a very small number of people fit enough to risk running on that slope.  I wasn’t one of them. Most often people you see are not on your course, or they may shoot past you to a big error in 5 minutes time. You must ignore them and run your own race.

Learn more about using your orienteering skills in practice with Janne Troeng, O-Ringen TV

Following on from the video series O-Ringenskolan aimed at beginners, O-Ringen TV have produced a series of videos Learn to orienteer in Lunsen with Janne Troeng (in Swedish Lär dig orientera med Janne Troeng) using the terrain and maps for the O-Ringen 2021. They cover Intermediate to Advanced skills and form a good link between our discussion here of Intermediate Skills and ideas that you can progress to as your orienteering becomes more Advanced. Janne is a very competent orienteer, don’t be put off by the speed he can do things at, he explains the thought processes very clearly and you can slowly build your speed as you get better at navigating.

This video How to make a difficult leg “easy” in Lunsen, shows Intermediate Skills ideas can be applied to much harder legs as you progress to a more Advanced level. Janne Troeng demonstrates Simplification and having a good Picture of the route in your mind. Then Notable Features are used to break the leg into sections.

Select No. 11 How to make a difficult leg “easy” in Lunsen, from the playlist (Click on the 3 bars top right of the video to see playlist)

Link to first video in playlist Learn to orienteer with Janne Troeng

The episodes include:

Review and practice your skills from different angles

Some books to consider

A summary of what we have covered so far

This graphic summarises what we have covered so far in Better Orienteering. It draws together the basic elements of the model of navigation that Better Orienteering is built on.