MapRun.uk

With MapRun you use a map to find a series of locations (commonly called controls) against the clock while travelling on foot. Your smartphone or smartwatch (Garmin only at the moment) is used to time your walk/run and to tick off the locations using its GPS as you find them. You can take part by yourself or in a group, but the beauty of MapRun is that, even when you do it on your own, once you have finished your course you can instantly view your results and compare how you did to everyone else who has done the course. It is a form of orienteering, but you do not need to be familiar with orienteering to enjoy MapRun. There are MapRun events all around the world in a variety of places, from cities and towns to parkland and forests. In general, local orienteering clubs will have created the courses in their area.

There are 3 main types of events:

• Line course - find all the controls in the right order as quickly as possible
• Scatter course - find all the controls in any order as quickly as possible
• Score course - find as many controls as you can in the time limit. Each control is worth a number of points; they may all have the same value or they may vary. The highest number of points wins. You will lose points if you are late back

MapRun.uk is a portal to help you to easily find maps and information about permanent and smart/virtual orienteering events near you (also known as POCs and VOCs). MapRun are the most common type of smart orienteering events. The main MapRun website and the smart device apps do not have the maps, nor do they have specific details on the events. Finding a map and details of a course usually requires you to find and navigate through the website of the orienteering club that created it, which may not be obvious. This also means that each club is having to maintain their own MapRun webpages which is a duplication of effort and leads to each site presenting information in a different way.

MapRun.uk has two main goals:

1. Easy and quick for users, including non-orienteers:

   First and foremost, MapRun.uk is designed to encourage the public to find everything they need to do permanent courses in their local area whether they are traditional POCs, MapRun events or others. A map or results can be obtained in 3 clicks without any signing up or having to type anything and the site is mobile-friendly. Alternatively, 3 clicks will get the visitor full event details in a clear and consistent format with descriptions/map of start location, parking, course and scoring details and where to locate the MapRun courses within the app. The wording is designed to not use orienteering-specific jargon. Smart courses are a fantastic tool to attract newcomers to our sport. To those people, we do not want to be saying Go Orienteering, we want to be promoting a general healthy and exciting activity for people.

2. Easy for Club and MapRun administrators:

   MapRun.uk knows a lot about your courses automatically to save you a lot of effort:

   • Start location
   • Number of controls
   • Course length
   • Scoring scheme
   • Start anywhere
   • Event start/finish dates and PIN protection
   • Postcode
   • How users should find the course within their app

   All that you need to provide is the map (either uploaded to MapRun.uk or linked from your club website). You can also add further descriptions of the start location (e.g. tree at NW of car park), parking details and any other information. You can add a second alternative map (e.g. a winter map or different layout) and control descriptions. MapRun.uk knows about all the MapRun courses in the UK. It just needs maps adding/linking

   Each event has its own page so can be linked to directly from your own website if required. These can be branded with your club logo and colours.

   Access to maps and events will be automatically allowed and revoked to fit in with any time limits you have set within MapRun itself. Therefore you can upload maps in advance of PIN-protected event opening and do not need to worry about remembering to remove maps afterwards.

   All events for your club can be easily selected by going to https://CLUBNAME.maprun.uk/ (for example, https://waoc.maprun.uk/ for WAOC's events).

MapRun.uk can group multiple courses in a single event. MapRun itself just lists the courses by name, so to tell users two courses were related (e.g. a short and long course) they would need to have similar names. MapRun.uk groups courses that have a common start location (within 100m) into a single event. This means they can share details on how to get there, parking, etc.