Maprun Forest Orienteering Training
As the rules on travel ease, we have more scope now to get out and about and extend our exercise domain. With this in mind, we have published 6 courses from our recent Forest Orienteering events, for you to go and run if you want some good technical forest Orienteering training:
- 3 using the 2020 Mallards Pike/Lightmoor event in the Forest of Dean.
- 3 using the 2019 Leckhampton Hill league event near Cheltenham.
As there are no controls on the ground, and you now face summer vegetation, these courses are not a stroll in the park; you need to be wary of ground conditions, very hard and uneven now, and with loads of vegetation hiding the many trip hazards off-path. They are, however, excellent training – you have to be spot on with your navigation, even with a generous 20m punch tolerance.
If you are going out to run alone please make sure someone know where you are going, and when to expect you back. In the Forest of Dean you won’t meet too many other people out there once away from the parking spots and obvious paths, and whilst MapRun will work fine, you phone may not have a signal.
The courses are set to allow you to switch on your track and location view features. You may wish to do this in case you find yourself convinced that you are in the right place, but the phone wont beep. If you do want to see where the phone thinks you are, you need to switch on these settings in the Settings and Options screen before you tap Go to Start; you can’t enable them once you have done that. Of course you don’t have to look at the phone if you don’t want to, until desperate; you can download and print a map from the Courses page.
So, get out and get some terrain training in, ready for when we can stage events again. Please use the comment facility in this post, comment on Facebook, or send a note to maprun ‘at’ ngoc.org.uk with any feedback you may have. Don’t expect the system to work quite as well as it does in suburbia, but you should be able to get a good run in, and without a flag to draw you in, you’ll need to be pretty accurate with your navigation. Remember, however, that you run these courses at your own risk and are responsible for your own safety.
