Trevour Pitt and I teamed up for this 8hr rogaine. I’ve only ever done one rogaine before. It was ages ago, but I remembered it being fun. Rogaines are like orienteering, but points are allocated to each checkpoint based on distance and nav. difficulty required to find them. Teams choose their own course based on how far they THINK they can travel in the allotted time. The team with most points, minus penalties i.e. for returning late, is the winner.
It was a good turn-out for Saturday’s event and I had several friends along in several teams so it was a good social catch-up too. Thor Egerton is off to the World MTB Orienteering Champs soon, and showing why she’s such a good navigator with a classy performance taking out the womens pairs with Claire. Good luck for the Worlds in a few weeks Thor.
Trev and I got off to a quick start, but within the first couple of hours had already made a couple of simple nav. fopars and lost some valuable time. Time to slow down and concentrate a little more on the basics of navigation! This plan worked out well, and we improved on our accuracy. So far the navigation hadn’t been too difficult anyways. The course was on farmland. Fortunately grass not too long, and not too rocky underfoot. I chuckled at the comparison to escaping from a war-camp with all the barbed wire fences we had to climb under, over and through:-) It started to drizzle early on in the race and continued for the remainder of the event.
My lack of time on foot recently began to tell. I haven’t done any running since catching the flu. I wasn’t able to run much for the last half of the rogaine, but Trev was also struggling a little with sore knees. It suited us both to slow down. Our focus for this event was nav. training anyway, so the plan was to soldier on and still get as many points as possible. Into the night we struggled with C.P. 32 in particular, and as a consequence ran out of time to pick up our last two intended controls. We were both limping home, laughing at ourselves for feeling like two geriatrics, and arrived back at the Hash House 15 mins after cut-off. We lost 150 points for late return, but still managed 6th in men’s open. We’re happy with that, but know we both have plenty of room for improvement.
The after event feed was great. Pumpkin soup (YUM) warms the cold bod! The QRA does a really great job of catering for these events. They are a real friendly bunch, so I can highly recommend anyone to go try one of these events.
I think I should have lost more points for also taking a wrong turn on the drive home(DOH!)
No comments:
Post a Comment