Night orienteering isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
Personally I like it, and I like it for two reasons.
Firstly, I’m much better at it than I am at daytime
orienteering. I think it’s because it slows the fast runners down to my pace
and gives me a chance to beat them.
But secondly, I think that it’s great training for day
orienteering. When you orienteer at night, you just have to be right and it’s
very easy to be wrong.
Those two points are very important, and are different.
In night events visibility is cut right down so it’s very easy to miss a
control that can really stand out in the daytime which means that even if you
are only a little bit wrong, you can lose a lot of time. And if you do get
lost, it can be very difficult to relocate and find yourself again.
How do you avoid getting lost at night then? Well the
answer is easy (although as they say, easier said than done), you have to use
all of those techniques that you know so well but often don’t bother with in
the day, because you can get away with it. Pacing for example is something that
we should always be doing but frequently don’t because we expect some feature
or maybe even the flag to be visible when we get near. In reality we often take
chances during the day that we know we shouldn’t, and usually we see the
control, or someone punching there.
Night orienteering encourages you to think about what
you’re doing far more – just because you have to and it gets you into the habit
of doing things right.
I had a season once where I couldn’t get to day events
and so I only did night-O. After a winter of that I finally went to a day event
and to be honest it felt like cheating; everything was just so much easier!
So, if you really want to improve your technique, try a
few runs in the dark.
