Winter Training

During the winter, it’s especially important to try and keep your orienteering, both physically and mentally, up to scratch.  Since August, I have been living in Norway, and as Norway is the country of orienteering, I have gotten lots of good practice in so far this fall/winter.  I've had a couple of training sessions that were new to me, so I thought I would share them.

The first thing I got introduced to was orienteering inside.  I've actually done this before, but never on such a large scale, and never as a race.  This can be incredibly fun, and the more the merrier.  For those of you with a college or university nearby, I would suggest this!  The idea is to find a building with as many passages, floors, staircases and dead-ends as possible.  Then, you draw a course with as many floor changes, dead-end controls and traps as possible.  And set everyone loose to get confused and run around in circles!

This is a map of one of the
buildings in the local university

It’s also very important to keep running during the winter, even if you are cross-training with skiing, or some other sport.  Long runs can be amazing.  Maybe chose a map that you haven’t run on in a long time, and just run.  If you live in an area with lots of lakes, maybe do a lake-to-lake run, although be sure to check that the ice is thick enough before you cross! 

A group of orienteerers out for a run

These days, you can start running at 11 and still catch the sun rise!

Those who have little to no snow, like those in Trondheim, can orienteer in the streets all year round.  Running can always be a bit more fun when you have a map to run on!  A recent training session here had us running longer legs, corridor style, with small sprint sections of 4 or 5 controls interspersed.

The point was to run slower on the corridor, and really try to
sprint the large circles.  You could not go outside the blue line.

For those not living in a snow-less climate, mental training is important as well.  Here, while we are doing core workouts, we also armchairs read, or remember what the columns in the control description mean, or choose the fastest route.

From my calculations, the shortest routes are:
1,A:2,A:3,C:4,B:5,C:6,C:7,A:8,C
I may be wrong.

I hope that you all are having a wonderful winter, whether full of snow, or not, and that you all continue to have a good year in terms of training!