Murphy’s Lore Sam has map, will travel, will get lost…

Unproductive,’ declares Hal (my Garmin), as I squelch back to the car park. He’s got a point. I’ve just run 2.5km in 28 minutes. But what Hal doesn’t appreciate is that this was no ordinary run – I’ve been orienteering. Like any race, an orienteering event has a start and a finish, between which you need to run as fast as possible. But there is no set route. And here lies the challenge. You have to navigate your way through checkpoints (called ‘controls’), using a compass and map, which demands ‘considerable cognitive skills and physical endurance’ according to Swedish researchers – and they should know, since they invented the sport back in 1919.

While the idea of cheating wouldn’t cross my mind, I couldn’t help noticing the door to every opportunity for doing so had been tightly shut. For one thing, you are only given the map on the start line, so there’s no chance of planning your route. Then, runners are set off individually (with gaps of one to four minutes between them) to prevent you following the person in front – and to top it all, you have to tap your electronic ‘dibber’ at each control (called ‘punching’) to prove you’ve been to each one and visited them in the correct order.

I’d figured I would compensate for my limited navigational skills with physical prowess, so when it was my turn to go, I sprinted across the field to the orangeand-white flag of the start control at the edge of the wood. I punched my dibber and then stared blankly at my map, panic rising within me.

The speed at which runners can extract key information from the map is one of the most notable differences between novice and expert orienteers, according to a Chinese study. The pros focus the beam of their attention on the most useful details, while newbies like me scatter their gaze all over the map, hoping a) they will be passed by someone they can then follow, or b) they’ll spot the control on a random search of the 100m radius around them.

After a few quivering breaths, I remembered to turn the map the right way up and headed northwest in search of a ‘path junction’ to find my first control. Yes, there it was! Follow the path around the bend, then a sharp turn, with a steep bank to my right to close in on my next target. Dib dib dib! Five or six controls in, I was getting into my stride – even managing to glance at the next-but-one control on the map as I ran, and noticing some of the topographical details from the map in the landscape around me.

Evolutionary biologists claim humans were born to run – we evolved to cover long distances on foot, to forage and hunt. These endurance forays weren’t just about brawn – the ability to spot predators, read animal tracks and droppings, or deduce where there might be water or edible plants, were crucial to survival. As I duck under branches, keep an eye out for roots, note the incline levelling off or the ground becoming marshy, I can’t help thinking that orienteering is the closest we can get to our ancestral running past. Orienteers have to engage their brains as they move through the landscape. Doing so, say researchers in the journal Frontiers

in Neuroscience, builds cognitive skills such as planning, decisionmaking, attentional switching, multitasking and self-awareness. I’d call that a pretty productive morning.