Proper courses

Anyone can drop twenty circles on a map. A proper course is the difference between a run people remember and one they merely finish. Nothing here is enforced by Checkpoint — these are the conventions the sport has settled on, and they are worth following even for a small club training session.

Make it worth running

A good course asks questions. Aim for variety rather than difficulty for its own sake:

• Mix the leg lengths. A run of near-identical 300 m legs is monotonous. Alternate short technical legs with longer ones that need a plan.
• Change direction. Legs that all run the same way turn the course into a procession, and let a lost athlete simply follow the person ahead.
• Change the technique. Some legs should reward careful map reading, others a straight compass bearing, others a fast decision about which way round an obstacle to go.
• Avoid the trail march. If the whole course can be run on paths without looking at the map, it is a road race with extra steps.

Note

The classic test: for each leg, ask “what decision does this ask the athlete to make?” If the answer is “none”, the leg is filler — move the control or drop it.

Controls: hidden, but fair

Nothing gets carried into the forest and hung on a tree here: a control is a coordinate and a punch radius, and the athlete’s phone confirms it. That makes the choice of site your whole craft — it should be not obvious, but entirely findable.

• Put the control on a feature that is genuinely on the map and distinct enough that whoever reaches it recognises where they are, instead of learning it only from the screen.
• Mind the punch radius. Too generous and the control registers while the athlete is still guessing; too tight and honest navigation gets refused. Match it to the size of the feature and to what GPS can realistically resolve.
• Think about reception before committing to a site. A control under dense canopy, at the foot of a crag, or deep in a gully can leave someone standing in exactly the right place with nothing happening — a kind of unfairness a physical control never had.
• Don’t crowd controls together. Overlapping punch radii let a single position satisfy two controls at once, and circles piled on top of each other make the map itself hard to read.

Reward the compass

The athlete who takes a proper bearing and trusts it should beat the one who runs the long way round on paths. That is a course-planning decision, not an accident:

• Offer at least one direct route and one safer, longer route on the bigger legs. Set the distances so that clean cross-country navigation is the quicker option — not by a landslide, but clearly.
• Attack points, a distinct feature just before the control, are what make a hard control fair. Make sure at least one exists.
• If every control can be reached by following a handrail — a path, fence, stream, or forest edge — the compass never comes out and the skill is not being tested.

Keep it safe

Safety outranks every other principle here. Plan for the route people will actually take, not the one you intend them to take.

• Because there is nothing to put out, a whole course can be set from an armchair. Go and look anyway. A shortcut that looks harmless on the map may cross a cliff top, a quarry face, a road with fast traffic, deep water, or a rail line.
• If a tempting shortcut is dangerous, remove the temptation: move the control, or place the leg so the dangerous line is plainly not the fastest.
• Mark out-of-bounds areas — private land, crops, nesting sites, unstable ground — and make crossing points explicit where a fence, wall, or road has to be crossed.
• Consider the conditions the course will actually be run in: dusk, heat, a solo runner with no one behind them.

Caution

Course borders and danger areas must be written into the course description. Athletes read the description before they start; anything not written down there is something you are trusting them to guess. Include the boundary of the area, every out-of-bounds and hazard, required crossing points, and an emergency contact or bail-out route.

Match the course to the athlete

One course rarely suits everyone. A 12 km technical course is a good day out for an experienced orienteer and a miserable one for a twelve-year-old.

• Anything longer than 10 km deserves company: duplicate the course and cut the duplicate down into a shorter, simpler version for newcomers, juniors, and anyone returning from a break. Duplicating keeps the original intact and reuses the same map and controls — and since there is nothing physical to put out twice, a second version costs you almost nothing.
• For beginners and children, keep controls on or beside handrails, keep legs short, and make each control findable by following a feature to it. One sensible route is enough — route choice comes later.
• For advanced athletes, the reverse: fewer handrails, longer legs, real decisions, control sites that demand precision.

Label the versions so nobody has to guess which is which — Long, Short, Junior in the course name does the job.

Respect the map

A map is somebody’s work, and often somebody’s property.

• Use a map you own, made yourself, or have permission to use. Orienteering maps are copyrighted, usually by the club that surveyed the terrain, and a club will normally grant use for a small fee or a simple request. Ask first.
• The same goes for the land. Permission to run an event on someone’s ground is separate from permission to use a map of it, and both matter — a club’s relationship with a landowner can be spent in a single unannounced event.
• Adding your own field work to a base map creates something new, but does not erase the copyright of what you built on.
• Credit the mapper and the survey date on the map itself. An out-of-date map makes a course unfair through no fault of the athlete.

Note

When you upload a map to Checkpoint you are stating that you have the right to use it. Keep courses private while you are still checking permissions — public courses are visible to everyone and enter the public course directory.

Before you publish

A short checklist worth running through:

1. Every control sits on a real, mapped, distinct feature.
2. Every punch radius suits its feature, and no two radii overlap.
3. No control sits somewhere GPS is likely to fail.
4. No leg’s fastest line crosses anything dangerous.
5. The course description names the borders, the hazards, and the crossings.
6. The distance and climb are honest, and suit whoever the course is for.
7. A shorter version exists if the course is long or technical.
8. You have the right to the map, and permission for the land.
9. You have been out there yourself — or know the ground well enough to answer for every control on it.

Then set it live. See Organizing events and building courses for the mechanics, and Training on your own for how athletes will meet a public course.