What do you do when lost? STOP! Don't run around in circles. Ask yourself - where did I last know where I was? Then - try and work out where you are now. Look around. What do you see? Orientate and cross check your map. Can you work out your location? If still in a muddle - go back to your last known point.
Twenty women learnt this art of "relocation" - finding yourself when lost - at the Women's Coaching Weekend held at St Helens on 26 and 27 May.
Head coach Christine Brown and her coaching team - Cathy McComb, Clare Hawthorne and Christine Marshall - provided sessions to focus on skill development.
In addition to learning to relocate, the women were taught:
- How to use a thumb compass to take and follow bearings
- "Traffic Lights" - When to run, walk and even stop!
- How to make sense of contour lines - doing a course with a map depicting only contour lines
- About map scales and estimating distances - knowing how many paces you roughly take to jog 100 metres
- How to simplify a complex map to read beyond the detail to see the features needed to navigate (contours!)
The maps used were all very technical, as hard as orienteering gets. But everyone applied themselves to find their way around the moonscapes of Golden Fleece, the hills of Transit Flat and the granite boulders of Littlechilds Creek. Controls were found. And "lost" only applied to one pair of glasses still out there somewhere in waist high bracken...
The next coaching weekend - this time open to everyone - of all abilities, ages and any gender - will be 21 & 22 July based from Orford. Look out for more details over the coming weeks.