Orienteering by The Editors of Encyclopeadia Britannica

Rating: ****

Orienteering is a great way to help navigate yourself with just a map to look at. There are many things that orienteering can benefit for a person such as a healthy lifestyle, using and reading a map ( which can definitely help you for hiking and any outdoors events), and can spark some competition. Its like a game, each time you find a flag, it feels like you’ve accomplished a lot and feels like a huge success but then you have to keep finding the rest of them. For me, being able to find it makes me feel incredible because sometimes the flags are very well hidden so I’m able to practice locating and observing the most precise detail in the forest to be able to point out the flags.

Orienteering is a sport that is similar to cross-country running, but with emphasis on map-reading and direction-finding skills. Instead of running on plain ground, orienteering is running through the woods and over hills or rough plains. There are variations of orienteering that include line orienteering, route orienteering and score orienteering but before going out, competitors study a master map of the course at the common starting point. Runners set out from the starting point at intervals of one to five minutes so that no one is following each group because one of the group could be cheating and just following the other group for the answers. So it is a pretty competitive game.

As a rower, I have to look on the map to know where the river end points are for the course so I don’t over row my way through the Rideau Canal. I feel that being able to read a map is really helpful because then I won’t get so lost and Isolation sucks a lot. I do a lot of route orienteering because my dad likes to make routes for my family and close friends and we would have an annual scavenger hunt. I guess it’s kind of like that except he gives us the points and all we have to do is find most of them in a certain amount of time. It’s really fun.

Reference:

Encyclopedia Britannica, (2015). orienteering | sport. [online] Available at: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/432445/orienteering [Accessed 6 May 2015].