* Indoor Training
Indoor Training
By Renee Beveridge, June 2019
Reflecting on my Reflections
After introducing NWOC specific training days in 2018, I have had really good feedback and hopefully we will start to see people improve. The trainings have been focusing mostly on our adults who came to Orienteering later in life and have been struggling at the red difficulty level, which is their ‘normal’ age grade. As the trainings went on, a number of younger trainees joined in and we now have quite a few trainees in every difficulty group (yellow, orange, and red). So far in 2019 we have had three physical outdoor trainings, but as a number of us are heading overseas soon there was no time to organise a 4th outdoor training, so I decided to host an indoor session.
Success?
I believe the indoor training was just as successful as the outdoor training sessions. It took up less time and worked well with my shift work as we can have it on week days. It involved hot drinks, biscuits, pizza (which Jula kindly drove to pick up), Q+A, two powerpoint presentations, 
and some interesting GPS/Live tracking replays from previous World Champs. The benefit of the indoor training is that we were all together. In the outdoor trainings each group is separate from each other for most of the time, and we don’t really get to have a
good debrief afterwards. When preparing the presentation for the indoor training, I had considerable time to reflect on the biggest issues I saw, speak to other coaches, and include visual examples into the powerpoint slide.
In this training session we again focused on contours and decreasing people’s reliance on compass bearings. We discussed different issues people have, and trainees contributed their own thoughts and asked questions. Even within the first hour a few people stated they had already learnt things, such as what the symbols were for erosion gulleys, vegetation boundaries, broken ground, and even elongated knolls. A lot of this was quite surprising to most coaches, as these symbols are on most maps so most of us assumed that anyone Orienteering consistenly for at least a year would have understood what these symbols were already. This just showed me how important it is to have these indoor trainings, as people get to chance to ask questions there and then and we can then solve it for them straight away.
After the first presentation we then played with sand. I provided a number of map images for trainees to represent in the sand and paper for people to draw on after making their own creation in the sand.
We then did another powerpoint presentation which involved myself and other coaches talking about courses, terrain, and issues they’ve had in the past. It was interesting to listen to other people’s experiences and 
I am sure it was nice for the trainees to listen to someone other than me talking. So thank you Jula, Pip, Tegan, and Jess; it’s often traumatising to look back through our most hated mistakes. A nice way to end the evening was looking at several GPS replays of past World Champs events, showing that even the best in the world can make huge blunders.
To the future!
After a number of us return from Europe I will be planning our next outdoor and indoor training. I think an indoor training is more beneficial after we have another outdoor training so that we have more things to discuss.
In September '19 I want to hold the next outdoor training in Hedley Dunes, on the map used for World Masters Orienteering Champs 2017, New Zealand Champs Long distance 2018, Queens Birthday 2018, and the last rogaine of 2019. The bottom half is also being use for the New Zealand Secondary School Champs 2019 (NZSSOC2019) in August and the top half is being used by Auckland Club for an AOS the weekend before NZSSOC2019. Hedley Dunes provides the normal luxury of very open forest that is relatively flat and easy to run through. The contours are obvious and abrupt, making it useful for people wanting to improve their contour reading. The contour detail is really complicated in some areas which will be good for people to walk through and understand that all the crazy brown squiggles, dots, and U-depressions are actually there and can be seen!
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