To tide us over whilst orienteering and adventure options are limited during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve pulled together a few activities that can be done from home.
| Get Active Locally |
Go on a Bear Hunt – The Great Sydney Teddy Bear Hunt will let you put your navigation skills to work and add some interest to your local walks. It’s easy to add your teddies and home to map to make the hunt even larger.
Sit Less – The Heart Foundation has some great tips on getting active as well as how to sit less.
Scavenger Hunt or a local Bingo – Here’s a few links but there’s plenty more available on the internet if you search:
At home exercise classes
- Les Mills On Demand – Les Mills has 800+ workouts that you can do at home. You can trial it for free for 14 days and then pay a monthly fee with the freedom to cancel anytime. Try some stretching and strengthening with Body Balance!
- Chris Hemsworth team’s home program – 6 weeks free
- To launch High Performance at Home , the NSWIS strength and conditioning team have put together a 12-15 minute Daily Flexibility Routine which you can complete at home.
You Tube – There’s loads of videos for yoga, pilates, Tai Chi and Qi Gong or strength for running and being active. Here’s some links for Qi Gong classes and yoga:
Go for a Local Walk or Run (or cycle)
- Runner’s World has lots of training ideas and information
- Grab an old orienteering map for somewhere local and rerun the course. Maybe run it in reverse or make your own course from a score course map.
- Get creative and make some artwork by recording your run, cycle or walk on your gps watch. Another option is to use the Strava app on your phone to record your efforts. Upload your track to Strava to share your picture with all your friends.
- Permanent Orienteering Course
- Garingal Orienteer’s new courses
- ONSW courses
- Other states also have their own permanent courses. Even if you can’t do them in person, maybe have a go virtually?Get creative and make some artwork by recording your run, cycle or walk on your gps watch. Another option is to use the Strava app on your phone to record your efforts. Upload your track to Strava to share your picture with all your friends.
If you would like to chat regarding your training program, please give Barbara a call or send an email.
| Develop your o skills |
Upskill with Bridget – Orienteering SA Coaching Coordinator, Bridget Anderson, has created some awesome videos with tips on how to improve your orienteering. Scroll through the Orienteering SA Facebook page to see the videos (there’s also some other activities linked on the page which you might enjoy).
Brush up on your map reading and compass skills and here’s a page compiled by a superstar Scout that we are sure you will appreciate.
Take up the World of O daily route to o-season challenge
Get ahead of the game and complete the Community Coaching General Principles Course online ready to help out your club with newcomer coaching. After completion you will be well on the way towards a Level 0 Coaching accreditation. Apply for Working With Children clearance whilst you are at it!
Orienteering Symbol Quiz – thanks Octavian Droobers for this great resource.
Orienteering Control Description Quiz – don’t forget that a “re-entrant” = a gully. Thanks to Dennis Tom and Steve Lang for development of this resource.
Try some Trail-O to sharpen up your eye for detail.
Up or Down? Try out this challenge from the Western Pennsylvania Orienteering Club. Traversing the length of each arrow, do you end up higher or lower? If you find an old map, you could set one of these activities for someone else in your family too.
Hills and valleys – understand the 2D to 3D (and vice versa) image transitions (from All4O).
Contours in orienteering – learn and practice your map reading. (Thanks Barbara Bryant, New Engalnd Orienteering Club). And here’s a great activity from our friends at Orienteering Queensland. Thank you Marion Burrill! Here’s the instructions but you need to follow this headcam video from a NZ race and see if you can answer the questions set for OQ juniors.
Learn from Thierry: Part one and part two.
| Try Virtual Orienteering |
Running Wild – Choose a course and virtually run it for free by clicking the mouse to make your route (under time pressure). After each course you can compare your route to other people.
Catching Features – With the free version you can run on two maps in single player mode or purchase the full version for USD40 (which includes up to 4 logins).
Virtual Orienteering – Another orienteering simulation game. Purchase it online for $49.95.
WinOL II – Oriantica – A basic virtual o option. The demo version is free and the full version is Euro29.
Route Choice Game – Hone your skills at quickly deciding if the left or the right route choice is fastest.
Navigate a virtual tour through Matlock in Derbyshire, UK using Google Maps and Street View. Printing the map will make it more like the real thing. Thanks to Derwent Valley Orienteers, UK for this activity.
Navigate a virtual orienteering race through Paris, Reims, other French cities as well as Amsterdam. At the start, look around for the small red locality icon to click to start and then see your orienteering map (just like a competitive orienteering event, you can’t see the map until your time has started).
| Calm the Mind |
- Petrea King online meditation group and Quest for Life
- Download the 1 Giant Mind app for a handy meditation course accessed from your phone.
| Find Some Motivation |
The Best 30 Running Movies Ever by Runner’s World
The Best Running Documentaries That Will Inspire You To Move by Runner’s World
| Photo Quizzes |
We’ve been having some fun with photos on the Bold Horizons Facebook page this week. You don’t need to login to Facebook to see the photo quizzes.
| Escape with a Virtual World Tour |
Take a virtual tour of Kakadu (Note the links on the tour site don’t work. You will need to type each location into Google Maps and then click on 360⁰ view to see the amazing landscape!)
Check out The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning and Online Collections – The scope of where you can go and what you can do is amazing. There are museums, art galleries, history, science, e-learning plus games, quizzes and activities. Some popular destinations include:
- Virtual tour of Yosemite
- Virtual tour of the Westminster Abbey
- Virtual tour of the Louvre
- NASA image and video library
Here’s another guide to virtual tours. There are some amazing places to see and explore!
| Puzzles |
Map puzzles – Cut up old maps to make jigsaw puzzles. Smaller and odd shape sizes will make it harder. To step it up even further, mix up the pieces of multiple puzzles.
Map jigsaw puzzles – This page was made by a WA Orienteer and includes some WA orienteering maps amongst the collection.
Orienteering puzzles by Scottish Orienteering
| Memory Activities |
Improve your working memory and orienteering.
Map memory – Grab some old maps and give yourself a short amount of time (say 30 seconds) looking at a leg from a past course. Within your allotted planning time, choose a route and then hide the map and draw your own simplified map and chosen route by memory. (There’s a demonstration of this activity in the first video by Bridget linked above.)
Memory game and colouring by the WOC2021 team
| Try Some Mapping |
Map your home – OCAD has introduced a new symbol set so that we can map our own homes. There’s a free trial of ocad available to be downloaded for 14-days.
Local mapping – Contact your orienteering club for a map of an area close to home and do some updating whilst also getting your daily exercise.
Open Orienteering Map – create your own map of the local area for a run. This is free software that makes it easy to develop a basic local map.
Open Orienteering Mapper – free software for developing orienteering maps.
