rogaining race (SARA state champs) 8:00:00 [3] 30.0 km (16:00 / km)
shoes: Asics Gel 2140
There are pros & cons to a 4pm start on a rogaine but for me it meant that I could spend the entire day eating rather than just having breakfast and then being too busy with planning to have lunch. Zara & I got the maps at 1pm and planning didn't take as long as I expected, maybe because this wasn't a map so big that you had to decide which sections to leave out and therefore it was easier to focus on the most efficient route to get the controls, and on the best approach when navigating in the dark.
Hash house was just south of Oraparinna on the (now-sealed) Blinman road and it was at the very eastern edge of the map. Western edge was Bunyeroo Gorge, southern edge the road into it, and north edge the road to Brachina Gorge. So, mostly fairly open terrain, with some thicker patches of native pine, and a few steep hills, but no nasty surprises (unless you don't like giant orb-weaving spiders. I have never seen such big ones as we came across out there. The tensile strength of their webs would snare a kangaroo!) Anyway, I looked at the course and said "David Baldwin & Julie Quinn will clean this up". They did, but with less time to spare than I expected; about 40 minutes.
Our plan wasn't quite that ambitious, leaving out 1/5 of the controls but only 1/7 of the available points. Bunyeroo Valley looked like a good place to be walking up the road after the moon had set, so we started by grabbing a couple of controls south of the hash house then heading west into the hills (the course setters seemed rather fond of summits as control sites). We had already got 7 controls before needing to get our torches out after 93 on Mt Sunderland - and before I was able to work out why my (expletive deleted) water bladder was leaking. It did this to me on Cradle too - turns out that the quick-release mechanism for detaching the hose from the bladder releases under the slightest pressure from anything else in my pack, thereby wetting the contents of my pack, which I'd had the foresight to wrap in plastic, and my rear end, which I hadn't.
Bunyeroo Gorge is flanked by a range of steep hills both east and west. We came to the east side of the east range halfway along its length, headed south to a fruit/water drop control at a hut above where the road drops into Bunyeroo, (here about 12.30am, took 15 min to drink & eat etc) then west to 75 & 92, steeply down off this summit, then ran down the road into the gorge, passing Bev and Kay, who claimed that she had recognised my running style by sound, from behind her in the dark!