Club Conference 2022Skills for novice orienteers
The session looked at 3 skills we might coach recent starters on a Saturday morning: Judging Distance, Using the Compass, and Identifying an Attack Point. The slides are here. The session plan is here as a PDF and here as an MS Word document. The club will promote the use of thumb compasses given their widespread use by elite athletes. There were 3 exercises. Firstly, the athletes walked and jogged 40 double paces to see how close that got them to 100m in each case.
Forty double paces are used as the number is easy to multiply and divide for distances longer or shorter than 100m. There was then a triangle exercise with the aim of returning to the start after bearings and pacing. Finally, the athletes followed a short course that required all of the techniques to be put into practice.