Rogaine race (NZ Rogaine Champs) 13:00:00 [3]
shoes: Merrell Allout Rush (#2)
With Emily. Feeling all prepared after a great sleep then of course that all goes array about an hour before the start when Mr P starts with a fury. I knew my body loved me...not. Managed to keep the nausea and pain mostly under control with regular high doses of pain killers but it was heavy. Think it took a pretty big toll on my body so should probably take it gently this week.
Anyway, the first 12 hours went really well. We were romping along and the controls were too easy. Then we couldn't find #64. I was pretty sure we went up in about the right place as I'd been timing our pace pretty consistently but it was a rough ascent over big rocks and there were small streams which Emily was worried was the river in the valley over. We wandered all over the show once we got higher but I think we needed more confidence that we had been right. We also should probably have taken the track up but hindsight is a wonderful thing. That did not help the mood though. Had a little bit of a mare on #72 but eventually found it just before Chris and Tim appeared. All was going well again until just before dawn at #47. We had to be in around about the right place but never found it.
The morning was a bit hit and miss. Emily was running out of food and her feet were not good and I was finding it hard to stay positive. Ended up ditching #58 halfway across the river when we were finding the crossing hard. The last loop was a bit depressing. Time was not exactly on our side so we dropped the further out ones but couldn't find #40 despite searching what we thought was every rock in the vicinity! Then came one hell of a terrifying river crossing I found hard to recover from followed by the worst rosehip bash ever! Decided we might not have time for the descent down from #86 so went to #62 instead. Got back about 20 minutes early.
So mostly things were pretty good but my night nav sucks though especially after clambering up big scary rocks in the dark for ages. Need to work on this but not quite sure how to go about that. Would have liked to have pushed a bit harder in the last 6 hours. Our route seemed pretty good for us and was quite novel to almost complete the whole plan.
It was nice to be feeling reasonably good the whole time for once (all things considered).
I seem to take quite some time to calm myself down after a bit of a panic attack. Worst panic attack was on the final river crossing where I completely lost my footing. Emily is amazing though and had me in her iron grasp the whole time but it still took me too long (15 minutes?) to calm down properly.
Emily is an awesome team mate. She knows me pretty well which is good as she can tell when I need extra support for those panic-inducing moments. I could not have done the river crossings without her.
No problem with eating for once. In fact I got hungry! I ate all my food other than 1 packet of chomp things and 2 gels which I would have eaten if I'd had water in the last 2 and a bit hours! Was very glad I had it all rationed out into 6 hour portions so I could stretch it out unlike Emily who ran out with quite a while to go. I ended up giving her a couple of my things.
Basically, I really like long rogaines and I would really like to improve more especially for a 24 hour (i.e. night navigation).
Food eaten (for reference):
6 bars (1 OSM, 2 x lara bars, 2 x clif bars, 1 pro bar), 10 gels, 2 packets of pro bolt chomps, 3 half vegemite sandwiches, 3 tofu sausages, 2 small bags of chips, 1 sachet of replace plus several nuun tabs.
Scenery was spectacular.