Sunday 26 June 2022
Roos and Pete were organising an orienteering event for Tayside orienteers in Camperdown park and put an email out to see if any club members wanted to join it. Orienteering was something me and Amy had been meaning to try and it was a weekend we were in Dundee so we thought why not. My knowledge of orienteering was it involving running round looking at a map trying to find specific points, having seen orienteering events I also knew the long trousers and T shirt combination that distinguishes orienteers from normal runners (who are more likely to wear shorts).
At the start we were introduced to the sport of orienteering with their dibbers and special maps (yellow = open ground and white = runnable woodland area). There were many more symbols but these were not explained. Camperdown being somewhere we knew well we decided not to bother taking our compass.
It was a fairly small low pressure event making a good introduction to the sport there were a number of different courses we had gone for the longest (which was apparently brave for new people). We set off at one minute intervals (so you can’t follow each other) and off we went. It started nice and easy finding the first three in quick succession 4 was more of a challenge for me before we headed more into the old golf course of long grass and harder running. A few of the later ones were a bit more sneaky to find (apparently they should be hidden until you find them on level of course we had entered). Amy managed to get a bit unstuck on the 7th checkpoint spending 6 mins wandering round bushes trying to find the point. Generally my slightly worse map reading and blundering about until I found it proved the superior tactic to Amy’s fine detail map reading (my longer legs may also have helped) and I finished 2nd/8 participants on the course we did, not too bad for a first try.
Definitely a fun day out and would be keen for more. A fun way to practice navigation and probably more useful (and cheaper) than going on a navigation course. Hopefully get more DMCers out on a future event (running definitely optional someone was doing it while walking their dog).
- report by Dominic
