Maps and map reading

Walking to time

Walking to time is one of the most difficult thing about orienteering and map reading. It is a skill that few people really master and is the difference between winning and losing on competitions and achieving success in expeditions as pacing is important to finding your way around and surviving hostile environments. To get good at walking to time you must find out your natural pace and how to vary it to effectively get to the destination.

Planning is key to walking on expeditions and William Naismith came up with some great rules of thumb for getting your timing right. Later Tranter added tables to take account ages and fitness of walkers

To make life easy on long routes use a web route planning tool or route card. It lets you work out how long your trip will take, you can get somebody to check it out for you and just as importantly if it is a route into mountains you can leave a copy with your base camp or home contact and should something go wrong they will have an idea of where to look for you.

More on Naismith rule
http://www.walkingontheweb.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naismith's_Rule

It is still a good idea to work out your own pacing, especially when walking as a group, rather than rely on tables as we are all different. Find a relatively flat area with no obstacles of about 200m long. Walk up and down this 5 times keeping your total time. You now have how long it takes you to walk a kilometre. Now work out how many kilometres you will do in an hour by dividing 60 by the number of minutes. For example lets say that you took 25 minutes then your speed will be 60/25 or 2.5km per hour. Compare this with a slope and when you have loaded yourself up with equipment.

What is the quickest route?
You will find that your pace is very different when walking on the flat or up and down hills. So when picking the route to travel there are three possible solutions. The shortest, longest and fastest. Any two of these may be the same or they may all be different according to the terrain and the walking ability of you and your group.

Boots
What are boots to do with walking to time. The truth is that boots are important in every aspect of walking and hiking. Make sure that you have ankle support when walking on hills so that you don't injure yourself. But don't pick boots that are so stiff and heavy that you find it difficult to keep pace especially when crossing obstacles like streams fences and styles.

Detours and boxing
Good navigators use techniques like boxing to go around difficult obstacles to keep to time. Look at compass work and pacing to see how this works.

Running
Running is the enemy of walkign to time since it changes how you burn up energy, tire and breathe. Good pacing is done without running.

Working out grid references
Contours