Racing TORUSby Janette Macleod
Credit: Janette Macleod
A short tale about my new found adventures in orienteering from your living room, office, or even the coffee shop.
I was introduced to Temp O simulator and the TempO Online Races Ultimate Series (TORUS) by club member Steve who was competing in the TORUS Christmas Cup and was disappointed to be the only participant from a Scottish Club. Intrigued, I signed up for an account and was delighted that the ‘are you human checks’ for new accounts are control descriptions – got to love a bit of orienteering geeking (don’t worry there is a cheat sheet).
What is it? It is virtual trail O
How does that work? It is all online. You get a picture of a location with 6 orienteering kites on it. You then get a series of map extracts and control descriptions. You need to decide if the map and description matches one of the control kites in the picture.
Example image, control description, and map extract. Control sites are A-F left to right. Select the right site or Z if there no match. (A is the correct answer)
How is it scored? Scoring is based on number of correct answers and time taken.
Once you have set up an account you can access training sessions to familiarise yourself with the functionality and get in some practice. It took me a bit of clicking around to get going, but got into it quite quickly. Anyone who is registered can participate in a race and I did my first race on 26 March. There were 6 stations, each with 5 control descriptions and maps. Each station had a time limit of 150 seconds, so a total of 12 ½ minutes. I really enjoyed it – lots of concentration and a bit of pressure, and all done whilst the potatoes were cooking. The race is open for 23.5 hours to allow time for for people to compete and then the full results are published; I ended up a respectable 387 out of 521 racers globally. Once the results are up I was able to go back and review each of the stations to see where I went wrong.
I find the virtual trail O good for really thinking about my map interpretation and the details of the control descriptions. It is also easy to log-in and do 10/15 minutes so can be a handy go to when there is some time to fill. I have never actually done none virtual trail-O so I can’t provide any comparisons to that.
Races are currently once per month and there are plenty of training options for practicing in between.
If you too are intrigued you can sign up here: TempO Simulator (opens in a new tab).
Competitors who do well at TORUS TrailO are the same ones that do well in real outdoors TrailO and it has become a respected competition amongst national squad members from around the world.
Ben Kyd (MDOC) is consistently the top UK competitor at this (often coming 1st in the world). BOF article - Ben Kyd wins TORUS trophy (a slightly older BOF article, but believe me he is still leading the way).
When Ben first started competing, he set up a YouTube channel with videos of himself competing. @the_orienteering_kyd (opens in YouTube). The welcome to the channel video provides a good intro, and there are plenty of other videos including live recordings of him during an event explaining his technique.