r/orienteering

I think a lot of my navigation mistakes come from confidence at the wrong moments. Early in a leg I'm careful, checking the map every fifty meters or so, and then somewhere in the middle I start trusting my memory of the terrain instead of the terrain itself. That gap is exactly where I lose time. Yesterday was a good reminder that slowing down for ten seconds to nail an attack point is almost always cheaper than the nine minutes I spent wandering reentrants that all looked the same.

Ended up finishing mid pack, nothing special, but I walked away from that one control with a better lesson than I've gotten from a lot of clean races. Curious if other people have a moment like that where a mistake taught them more than a good run would have.

Coming from a background of mostly urban sprint orienteering, I finally committed to doing a proper forest course last weekend. It was a middle distance on a detailed map in a mixed conifer and birch area, around 4.5km with 150m climb. Honestly felt like a completely different sport.

The biggest adjustment was slowing down my map reading pace. In sprints I'm constantly moving and checking the map in quick glances, but out in the forest I found myself needing to stop completely at times to figure out which re-entrant I was actually standing in. Got completely turned around between controls 4 and 5 because I was moving too fast and missed a subtle depression that would have confirmed my position.

A few things that caught me off guard:

• Contour reading is so much more important than I expected. I've always kind of glossed over contours in urban maps but here they were basically the main language the map was speaking.
• The undergrowth runnability symbols on the map took some getting used to. What looks like a short distance on paper can be a very slow, frustrating push through dense vegetation.
• I kept defaulting to catching features too late rather than aiming off and using attack points early. Old habits from sprint courses.

Finished the course without retiring, which I'm counting as a win, though my time was about 20 minutes slower than the median for my class. Planning to do another forest event next month and focus specifically on relocation techniques. Anyone else find the transition between sprint and forest orienteering took longer than they expected?