1. Before you start study the map and the legend. Do so for as long as you can. Get familiar with the general shape of the area. You don't want to waste time during the competition trying to puzzle out what's up and what's down, what's a fence and what's a wall. Take a few sample measurements to get some idea of the distances.
2. Don't think of the competition as a race. It isn't, it's a time trial: it's you against your own weaknesses. That person you are trying to outrun may be going an idiotic way, or may be fresh from standing still scratching his head for five minutes while you were toiling up that hill. Even if you do outrun him, he may be a better navigator or stronger over distance. So you overtook a British Champion on 300 metres of flat path - so what? S/he won't stop when s/he comes to a hill or bracken or a difficult route choice.
3. Never run at absolute top speed. You should finish an orienteering course as you finish a good meal, feeling that you could have enjoyed just a little bit more. Never let yourself get exhausted. You can waste time on the last control as easily as the first, and it's really frustrating to ruin a good run near the end simply because you got a bit too tired. If you do finish with plenty of energy, go out again and see where you wasted time by making poor route choices or standing around.
4. Try not to stop. Take a breather if you need to, but keep moving, even at a slow walk. The difference between first and tenth is often not the speed of movement but the amount of time standing still. Add up the half a minute here and the fifteen seconds there when you weren't actually moving, and you'll realise how much time you could have saved.
5. Don't stand still even if you're lost. The Fairy of the Forest might appear and light your way, but she never has for me. Retrace your steps if you can. If you can't, decide on a direction - if I go east, I must hit that road - and move on, keeping your eyes skinned for any feature you should be able to identify on the map. Or get to that road as quickly as you can, and start again from there. Better to spend a couple of minutes running 400 metres than quarter of an hour getting nowhere.
6. Don't run on 'feel'. Always keep your map set, even on a track. And in the forest always run on the compass, however roughly. It's horribly easy to drift to one side or the other without realising it and come out on the wrong path, even one at 90 degrees to the one you were aiming for.
7. Don't rush off from one control towards the next thinking you can plan your route later. Move a little way and then plan. Pick a specific attack point and plan your route to it. You must know what you're doing - or when you're getting near the control you may find yourself confronted by a marsh or a hill that you should have been working your way around.
8. Don't run without counting your paces, however unnecessary this may seem. So you think you can see your attack point? Well maybe you can, but count anyway. It might be a similar feature 50 metres earlier or 50 metres later, and even 50 metres can leave you bewildered and panic-stricken, if you don't know it's only 50 and not 200. If you count and keep your map set, you'll always know where you are.
9. Never assume that you are right, and the map and compass are both wrong. It's possible but highly unlikely. Preconceptions are our greatest weakness. If you 'know' it's the right re-entrant but there's no control, be humble enough to consider that it might just be you that's wrong. Look at the map and find the parallel re-entrant you have madly rushed down. If you forget where you thought you were, it's surprising how often you can work out where you really are.
10. Always read the contours on the map and on the ground. It's easy for beginners to think of contours as those dammed bits of spaghetti that get in the way of walls and streams. Even experienced orienteers go wrong surprisingly often, by not noticing that they should have been running downhill instead of up.
11. Don't kid yourself you can beat the superstars. Orienteeringskills have to be learnt. There's nothing magical about bearings, step-counting, contouring or mapmemory. But theory is not enough: being able to use them with confidence and speed can only come with practice. So if you don't train specifically for orienteering then you must be prepared to use some competitions to experiment a bit. Don't worry that you might have come third if you hadn't tried to cut through that bit of forest. It's no good always running around the paths. For a year I rushed about covering tremendous distances, thoroughly enjoying myself, but scarcely orienteering, scarcely improving, scarcely learning anything at all, except that it's not possible to beat someone who can run and go through the forest. Here be no dragons except the dragons of panic in your head.
12. Don't think that fitness is not all that important. There are those near the top who don't run particularly fast but they're all very fit. It's always the fit who tell you fitness doesn't matter. They have probably forgotten how easy it is to make terrible mistakes through sheer exhaustion.

These tips are adapted from an article by John Knight which appeared in the December 1983/January 1984 edition of Compass Sport.