Socially distanced orienteering
The Street-O (winter rogaining) season ended on Wednesday, 11 March, right before…everything. By the next Wednesday, emergency measures were in place and even if an orienteering event had been scheduled that day, it would have been cancelled.
But when winter orienteering season ends, spring/summer orienteering begins. Usually that means everyone showing up at the starting area once a week sometime during a two-hour window and running around in the same forest at the same time as the other competitors, swiping a hand-held emit through shared checkpoints. It quickly became clear to the organizers that orienteering season in the time of coronavirus couldn’t happen like that. So they changed the way we do it, and now we have socially-distanced orienteering.
In socially distanced orienteering, there are no emit-swiping checkpoints (I’m sure that was the first thing to go when they were deciding how to redesign everything). There’s a flag, but nothing to touch or swipe.
A weekly two-hour start window for each orienteering course leads to crowds and contact and lots of people running around in the forest at the same time, heading for the same checkpoints. Now, each course is open for an entire week or even ten days, and you go complete it whenever you want to. Each time Jeremy and I have gone, we have sometimes seen other people, but not always.
OK, but what about the maps? In order to run the course, you need a map. Well, in socially distanced orienteering, the maps are self-service. You pay the participation fee online, and then some clubs send you the map to print your own at home. The club we mostly participate in has maps at the starting area in a plastic tub, with instructions to put on gloves and hand sanitizer before taking one (that’s the image at the top of this post; the background looks indoorsy but it’s just a covered BBQ area).
It turns out that the experience of orienteering doesn’t suffer too much from the lack of communality. But one necessary casualty was the list of results. While you can of course look at your own watch to see how long it took you to run the course, without swiping an emit at each checkpoint, there is no easy way to compare your results to others. Some clubs allow you to upload GPS data to cobble together a kind of results list, but we haven’t bothered.
Orienteering has been a lifeline during the lockdown period and I am grateful to have it, even if it’s this new, socially distanced version.
