Indoor orienteering creates new, fun challenges

Indoor orienteering creates new, fun challenges

As winter sets its dark and cold mark on the northern hemisphere during these months, there are more and more offers to run indoor orienteering in a number of countries.

The discipline, which transforms schools, workplaces and municipal buildings into challenging orienteering terrains – often with multiple floors, is popular with athletes of all ages.

The courses often offer intricate staircases, corridors and balconies, and the demanding legs give athletes who otherwise have many years of experience from forest or urban terrains headaches.

At the same time, the discipline is often easy and exciting to follow for spectators, just as it can be relatively easy to gain access to the “terrain”, if it is, for example, a building that is not used on weekends or in the evenings.

Fun challenges in Poland
One of the events that has put Indoor Orienteering on the program is the Arkady Cup in Poland.

The sixth edition of the event was held at the end of November 2025 and offered a two-part challenge. First an outdoor sprint in Kobyla Góra in the southwest corner of the country and later indoor orienteering at the town’s primary school.

At first glance, most of the participants seemed to think “You can’t really get lost in a school…”

But they had to realize that with a maze of corridors, multiple floors, corners, staircases, shortcuts, and dead ends – every meter could completely change the race.

The competitors had no time to rest, as navigating the school labyrinth turned out to be a real challenge.

Indoor Orienteering Working Group
During 2025, the IOF Council has set up a working group with six members to discuss and investigate how Indoor Orienteering can be developed as a discipline in the future.

This follows a Member Information Meeting in the spring, where a majority of the participating member federations responded that they think indoor orienteering has a future within their federation program.

The working group has now started up and will share its findings at a later date.