An Adventure Sport

Orienteering is an adventure sport. It can take place in some of the most remote but beautiful forests and moorlands in the UK. It enables you to explore parts of the countryside that you would never normally get the opportunity to visit.

An orienteering course is marked on the map, but no route is shown. The ultimate quest for an orienteer is to find the balance between mental and physical exertion, to know how fast you can go and still be able to interpret the terrain around you and decide how to get from each point successfully. It is a true endurance sport which involves a huge mental element and requires extremely high levels of fitness at the elite level.

If you've tried to read a map whilst running over rough terrain as fast as you can, at the same time making route choice decisions and checking the landscape for features, without getting lost or falling over, then you've experience the thrill of orienteering!