Family Orienteering

Orienteering is truly the sport for all. Come to an event and you will see participants aged from under 8 to over 80. Some will be running fast and will be very competitive, others will simply be out for a walk in the park with the family.

So how do you get started as a family? Just check the fixtures list and come along to an event or an activity. Have a read at our Beginner Guide to Orienteering page, and the Competitions Guide which explains about the colour coded courses and how to choose the right course(s) for you and your family. Don’t be put off because an event might be a “Championship”, as there will still be a colour coded course suitable for beginners.

Families usually start walking around a course as a group. Young kids will love the “dibbers” that make a beep sound at every control visited. Soon they will want to be running ahead to get to the control first. Then they will want to read the map themselves and progress to Yellow course. The next step is to let them run ahead themselves, with the adult “shadowing” behind, just in case they make a mistake reading the map. However before you know it they will want to be competing all by themselves. on White or Yellow. At this point the parents have probably got the bug too and will be out on the Orange course and soon progressing to Light Green.

Roll on a few years and the kids fly the nest and with study, work, relationships and the busyness of life perhaps don’t orienteer as often as they did. But by then parents are often have passed the “retirement” age for other sports particularly team sports. The beauty of orienteering is there is no retirement age! There is no pressure to “make the team”, so orienteering becomes their main interest. The only pressure is competing against yourself and wanting to beat your peers who you will know by now. Orienteers move up to the darker colours as they become more experienced, and then drop back down again in the veteran years.

Roll on a decade or two and the offspring often rediscover the sport with their young families!

We will soon be updating this page with stories of how some of our families got involved in orienteering.