Orienteering Christmas Event

Wednesday, 9 December 2020

Funnily enough the Christmas Event was originally the only orienteering event that Jon and I were rostered to organise this year. However this year has been crazy - and for various reasons we've ended up organising 11 events between us. Jon has also organised 2 training camps, while I've made 3 maps which have been used, and another 2 which haven't yet.  That's a lot of time spent on orienteering stuff! Luckily effort is rewarded by seeing people enjoying themselves, and last Sunday's event had a pretty big dose of that!   

The Christmas Event is generally supposed to have some Christmas themed novelty factor - and if there's one thing I'm good at, it's dreaming up novelty events with complicated rules.

So this event included a maze that the competitors had to navigate part way through their course:

Mazes are fun, but I didn't think that was enough novelty so I added a couple of extra challenges. Before entering the maze, competitors had to wrap a present for themselves (a 57c packet of wafer biscuits) and make a suitably illustrated gift tag. Zali supervised this to ensure the wrapping and illustrations were done acceptably. 

Then the competitors navigated the maze with their present until the final control when they had to toss it into the giant cardboard chimney that Zali and I made from sofa boxes.

Once they'd landed it in the chimney they were able to continue their course. It all looked pretty fun and the results of the wrapping and tagging were interesting:

The weather was forecast to be pretty terrible but in the end it wasn't as bad as we expected and most people stayed for the BBQ afterwards.  All in all it went really well. Yay!