Discussion: Key to mid-week training success?

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, our club, COC, is huge- but we have zero mid-week training or even weekend training when there's no meet.

What are the keys to putting on training that is:
-'low maintenance'
-utilizes local, park terrain (not rugged)
-useful, by targeting specific skills

My biggest question surrounds making it low maintenance, so that it's not a big production to put on and can be easily put on by different people.

Having your club centred around a small geographical area is how it works for almost every GB club.

@Becks- depends on your interpretation of "small," but I'd guess that the bulk of our club is centered around a small geographical area.. Most are in/close to Seattle and the majority at least in the 'greater Puget Sound area'.

Do you say this is important so that the venue is nearby? So that volunteers are nearby?

I have started mid-week trainings around Ljubljana, where there are around 150 orienteers nearby. In my experience the only important thing is you - the person, who puts a little bit of effort in 'organisation'.

Firstly I created a FB group, where I could ask people to come to the trainings, but after a few trainings I simply set up a Google Docs entry spreadsheet, with possibility to add coments, remarks, enter your own time ... Of course, we have a well established website of the federation, where I can publish the invitations.

I gathered maps from the clubs in the area, there were surprisingly many. I don't want any training to be more than 30' drive from the centre. Then I started course planning and simply asking people to drop by on Tuesday or Wednesday evening, after work/school. We started with 4 people, continued with 10 and then reached 30 and more ...

For the first 4 trainings I didn't even bother to put out controls ... People didn't care that much about it. This kind of training can be just fine sometimes. Then people started asking me if I needed help ... And voila ... I have volunteers now to put out controls (now, when there is already dark after work, we simply use those 'reflection bands') and volunteers to pick them up ... And if there is nobody to do it ... Well, there are no controls in the forrest. :)

So - this is low maintenance and it really does work. You just need to take care of spreading the info, course setting and printing the maps (later people will offer to do that for you :)).

I too have puzzled over this and will follow the replies with interest.

When we're on an orienteering tour and can acquire maps, its easy to design a course on paper to focus on particular skills; go there, and run it. Sometimes a faster runner may set off before the others and place biodegradable markers (toilet paper). Sometimes we operate in pairs and then having markers doesn't matter. The main thing is that being called "training" there's no expectation for perfection.

However the challenge is how to simulate rural terrain in a local park. Its easy to train for the sprint distance, but the terrain doesn't normally match the usual middle or long. Some ideas include doctoring the map to exclude stuff eg paths; rules like "you must WALK in all green/white" to change route choice; use of darkness; wearing blindfolds (joke, but would like to limit visibility somehow)

In Boston we have a group that meets for training on one evening each week. I think a few key things that make it work are:
1. Relatively close geographically (the people who live further out come to correspondingly fewer trainings).
2. Being flexible. A lot of our trainings are street-o's, some of them have been track or hill workouts, and the person organizing always has the final say as to what the training is and where and when it happens.
4. Having fun. We often times have dinner afterwards, and it's as much a social group as a training group.
3. Having a few gung-ho people. It seems like you've got that covered.
4. Having a critical mass of organizers. We have enough people that nobody has to organize more than once per season, so it's not too much stress on anyone.

On a related note, street-o can be made fairly tricky by turning it into a corridor exercise using open orienteering map, or by doing a line-o and turning off the streets, if you happen to have a buildings layer.

If all you're after is going for a midweek run with a map in hand, do a thorough reccie run around a street map, mark the locations of loads of lightpoles, pick a subset for an 'event' and run a mass start scatter format run with 45 min or so time limit.

If you mark enough light poles on your reccie run you could have enough control sites for 2-3 events. Has the bonus of not having to put out any markers, but only works if there is some identifying mark on each of the poles that must be recorded to prove visit (all the lighpoles in areas near me have a 5 digit number code on them to record)

GVOC has been running a mid-week training session, called the WET series, for almost 10 years now. This has been a key factor for growing the club from 100 members to almost 700 for 2012. This dependable schedule, week in and week out, really helps build an active club.

1. Maps are (almost) all city parks that are relatively close to everyone (we don't have much of any forest terrain close to the city anyway). We now have about 40 different maps, which is enough to support the 50 sessions per year without getting too repetitive. The city parks are great for beginners.

2. Simple organization. Usually just a single course and pin flags for controls. Pin flags have reflective tape for the winter time. Manual timing. No permissions. The week's organizers puts on whatever they feel like, can be normal point-to-point, score-O, handicap box, memory-O, one-man relays etc etc.

3. Cheap to participate (free with membership, which is $10 per year). We subsidize the WET series with the income from our 10 WhyJustRuns and other A-meets.

4. Social. Those who want go to a pub or pizza for dinner after.

5. WETs are a great way to start to train new officials. It's not as intimidating to put on a single course with pin flags as a B-meet or A-meet.

the big thing in the UK these days are 'club nights' which focus on a specific location and meet weekly. During the winter we meet every Wednesday at a local school gym and do drills/circuits followed by some map exercise. Great for getting together and training in a sociable environment. In the summer we meet somewhere outdoors (usually different each week) for some O training and rotate the organisation around a group of keen individuals.

Andrew - any idea how an Aussie could get their hands on the year in a box resource?