50 years of New Zealand Orienteering Championships, we are now at the eve of NZOC2022. The calm before the storm.

It seems that making it to the start line for this year’s nationals is itself a challenge with many succumbing to COVID or the isolation requirements in the final week. The event though has seen some favourable movements, in phase almost perfectly with our national trajectory out of COVID. Event restrictions have been entirely removed and the weather is looking on point (might I say, as expected). Another omen, New Zealand moved to the “Orange” setting yesterday.

This post will be brief, as deployment and delivery are first and foremost for the Event Team. I wanted to conclude this NZOC2022 story by talking to elite sports, of course specifically orienteering. The pursuit of sporting goals has shaped a large part of my life and identity. The feelings, both highs and lows, are some of the most meaningful and rewarding I have encountered. It has formed a large portion of my value base, given the attitude an athlete must have to push their body and mind to seek improvement, to ultimately, an arbitrary end. But it is the pursuit of such ends, to derive meaning from a process of continuously improving, which I think is so fun.

NZOC2022 is the trials for the Senior and Junior national teams to compete later this year in Europe. It is a goal for many. Representing your country at the world stage is an honour and has a rich tradition in the orienteering circles, comparable to the history of nationals itself. To make the national team you must race well at trials, which brings us back to this weekend and some of my guesses as to who shall come out on top.  Note, these are not likely to feature at the TAB any time soon, as orienteering has not quite reached the size required or level of corruption that many other sports have. 

For the Women, Lizzie Ingham is still the dominant force in New Zealand orienteering. However, I think it might just be time that Amelia Horne formally announces her arrival to elite orienteering. Georgia Whitla is poised to upset, as is Amber Morrison. But there are many others who’s form I have not researched but could equally deliver winning performances; Imogene Scott, Marina Comeskey, Kirsty Coombs, Jenna Tidswell to name but a few.

For the men, I can’t help but entertain the idea that Chris Forne, The Adventure GOAT, will emerge victorious in at least one of the days but there are many who will challenge. First and foremost, Duncan Morrison, my fellow Oman, who’s eagerness for competition is as palpable as Nick Hann’s disappointment in not starting, relinquishing his own comeback to COVID. Gene Beveridge, Joseph Lynch and Tommy Hayes will all be in the mix. No doubt Brent Edwards shall be exuberating confidence beyond his levels of fitness, but that will just add to the theatre of racing.

And so it begins, it all starts with a triangle, the first competitors head out just before 2 pm tomorrow.

NZOC2022, it is now time to find your adventure.

50 years of New Zealand Orienteering Championships, we are now just one week out from NZOC2022.

Orienteering is a technical sport.  The maps we use are the most detailed topographical maps produced.  The navigational skills required to move through the terrain at speed whilst rapidly interpreting a pseudo-subjective 2D canvas loosely representing the complex 3D environment, under oxygen debt, take years to refine and master.  Many don’t, and even if you do, it is for only a fleeting moment.  Herein lies the challenge and beauty of this sport.

This post talks to the technical aspects of NZOC2022, from mapping to event organisation, concluding with some technical skills I think will be relevant to emerge satisfied from the competitions next weekend.

Maps are the foundations of our sport.  They are also the biggest assets to clubs, a substantial map being an appreciable investment usually funded through large events or community grants.  Without maps, there is no orienteering.

An orienteering map is a data-derived work of art constrained by a strict internationally accepted symbol set.  Whenever I compete, turning the map over and seeing a high-quality cartographic product is always incredibly satisfying – this to me is a win, even before I have started.  There are many maps that I have fond memories of, but for sure, the one that is still at the top of my list is Lunsen, Uppsala. 

We are spoilt in New Zealand with the variety of terrain that we have access to and therefore the diversity of maps we can compete on.  NZOC2022 brings to the New Zealand orienteering community the product of the Canaan Downs Mapping Project, which for the quality of mapping and the incredible micro-variety in the terrain I believe deserves a place on the 101 Orienteering Maps you should run on before you die!  You only need to look at the map from the first New Zealand Orienteering Championships to see how far we have come.

The base data for Canaan Downs is LiDAR captured primarily in 2020.  Luckily for NZOC2022 it was made available in September 2021, just in time for the detailed mapping process to begin over the summer.  The statistics of the project by Bryan were outlined in the previous scene setting post.  But from the image at the top of this post you can see the clarity in terrain forms captured by the LiDAR survey and how the various post-processed layers are used to construct the orienteering map. 

Canaan Downs, in my opinion, offers the authentic New Zealand orienteering experience and will be used for the Middle and Long at NZOC2022.  The Sprint and Relay maps have also been made using similar LiDAR data, so you can be sure of the mapping quality next weekend.

Organising an orienteering event, especially one that has the logistical and technical complexity of a nationals, is by no means an easy feat.  We recognised this early in the piece and swiftly positioned personnel to core roles, while keeping the top level small and focused.  This meant decisions could be made swiftly and the complexity managed appropriately.  In recent weeks the Fa’avae event delivery team has been mobilised and we have widened the volunteer base to ensure the event itself does justice to the beautiful terrain, maps and courses.

To give you an appreciation for the technical scope across the four days, below are some numbers:

• 4 arenas designed
• 270 control sites checked, double checked and marked in the field
• 40 individual courses planned (63 layout designs applied to cater for the different map scales) and 5 relay courses planned
• 51-55 individual competitor classes to assign to each course, ensuring courses have appropriate physical and technical difficulty
• 483 unique competitors yielding 1950 individual maps printed on waterproof Teslin paper
• 52 pages, the length of Bulletin 2 (soon to be released)

And this is before we have spoken about the technology required to actually manage an orienteering event on the day. All the various software platforms through to hardware, now bare-minimums for national level events.

Talking to Nathan recently, I raised the technical risk that an orienteering event team assumes.  If you were to approach an orienteering event from a purely business perspective, you would walk away before you even started.  I am not sure there are many other sporting codes in which the organisers carry such a level of technical risk; usually the organisers would provide the venue but then the technical side is largely managed by the competitors.  But I believe, it is for this reason we have such capable people in the orienteering community.  For a concluding remark on organising orienteering events; it is saturated with skill and passion, but the financial side for the level of complexity (e.g. compared to trail running) simply doesn’t stack up.

But at the end of the day the purpose of NZOC2022 is to bring together the community for the pinnacle domestic event.  The variety across the weekend will demand a technique which is adaptable, especially amongst the ancient beech trees and rock formations of Canaan Downs. After 20 years of orienteering, constantly refining and evolving my own technique, learning all the way, I came to the “Master the Compass, Master the Map” approach which I try employ to this day. It is difficult to truly train orienteering in New Zealand, for here it is one of the sports where you spend most of your time competing opposed to actually practising.  But this just makes for exciting racing, especially under the pressure of a national championships, and the mistakes that people therefore make.  So, my parting advice for managing the technical demands of next weekend is to keep it simple.  As Timmy always says, “it all starts with a triangle”.

NZOC2022, it is nearly time to find your adventure.