For a long time I had nurtured the idea of using the Rogaine to test some fundamental military skills and abilities like navigation, physical endurance, cross-country negotiation on foot and small group leadership. That was until I was approached to run a leadership exercise for 30 people. Since I was given complete freedom on the design of the exercise I decided this was a perfect opportunity to test my theory on unsuspecting adults in challenging conditions.
We Rogainers, and to a lesser extent Orienteers, are familiar with the adventurous-competitive urge we experience in these races. It is the potent combination of not knowing your progress relative to your rivals and the dilemmas of the course and the myriad of inter-related considerations: points value, climb, distance, physical load, gear requirements, visibility, rate of going, navigation risk, mental load and water needs. Excellent sources of motivation and challenge I thought.
I chose the Flock Hill and Craigieburn Stations for this activity because it had been used for a previous Rogaine and it was handy to our Burnham base. The area proved to be a good choice for a number of reasons. The numerous tracks provided good access for setting-up and contingency plans. The open landscape and rounded land forms were ideal for the officer cadets to practice their limited navigation skills while the large features and alpine conditions provided a testing physical challenge.
The Rogaine format was the basic building block for this exercise to which I then added six, remotely located 'command' activities. This number matched the group size so each person had an opportunity to lead the group through a task. I had to somehow encourage the groups to visit all the task sites, and thus give every person a task-driven leadership opportunity, so I allocated substantially more points to the tasks than to the checkpoints. It must have worked because the 'average' group completed 80% of the activities but visited less than 30% of the checkpoints.
Two further changes to the Rogaine format were made to increase the training benefit. The activity started just after dusk. This maximised the mental challenge while the groups were at their physical best and also dusk on the last day was a good time to end the exercise. The groups were also required to start on different command activities as this created dispersion of the groups from the start and placed pressure on them in their planning to identify the optimum starting point. To make this fair to all groups, vehicles were used to drop groups to a point about 3 km from their first activity.
I was pleasantly surprised by the results of my experiment, not just because all personnel returned intact and alive at the end, but the feedback was positive. The 'winning ' group completed all the activities and visited 50% of the checkpoints. The main learning points for the participants were the importance of initial planning and the need for situational awareness when the going got tough.
As the NZ Army has used a variation of the Rogaine format for a number of years, at least in officer training exercises, my 'experiment' was not truly unique. There are limitations to how Rogaining can be used for military training. The pure form of Rogaining is not suitable for operational training because there is no equivalent in the sport to the phenomenon of tactical encounter. There may be a way of doing this while eliminating the anti-competitive element of chance. If I think of a way to do this I may be inclined to conduct further experiments.
Markham also led a relatively inexperienced Army team to sixth place in the Southern
Traverse in 1999. And after bursting onto the elite orienteering scene last year,
he has been named in the National Orienteering Squad. You'll be hearing more of this
man!