Rogaining 17:00:00 [3]
Australian Rogaining champs with Marty. We planned a pretty good route and started at what I thought was a conservative pace. Hitting the controls pretty well even once it got dark.
I had a bit of a worry when might light went out after not much more than an hour, stumbled along after Marty too the water where we saw Tom and Paul and I got a new battery out.
The next section was very steep and tough and although we got the controls well we were both slowing down and looking forward to the all night cafe. We finally got there at about 12.20 having covered about 55k which was about 55% of the course by my reckoning.
At this stage Marty wasn't feeling great and not long after he walked away from the fire to spew which wasn't a good sign. We spent the next few hours sitting by the fire, I'm not sure what Marty was doing cos I kept falling asleep in between eating soup.
Eventually we decided to get going again and planned a few controls to see how we were feeling. It was freezing at this stage but we warmed up pretty quickly once we got going. Marty was going pretty well now but I felt crap and was struggling and we made a big mistake after a while. I was feeling very cold and dizzy and stopping to work out the mistake made it worse so when we worked it out I convinced Marty we should head for home via a few high pointers on a direct route. At the stage I was stumbling all over the place but eventually I had one of Marty's no doze and almost immediately felt fine. In retrospect I was just asleep on my feet. The last few hours were quite relaxing and enjoyable as the sun came up and we strolled back to some bacon and egg rolls. A bit soft from me, don't think my heart was in it once we stopped at the all night cafe. I also think we suffered from planning a route based on how fit we were a few years ago rather than our current capability. Really need to have some some training to push hard for 24 hrs!! Great area and course and very impressive performance from Dave and Julie to win.