rogaining race (Bush 6 hour) 5:53:00 [4] 38.0 km (9:17 / km)
shoes: Asics Gel 2160
Second Valley (mostly pine) Forest. This was the Asthma Foundation 'Take a Breather' event and there were about 150 teams. It was also a fairly cold day and I made the decision to stuff a spare thermal into my tiny pack and wear my raincoat, which I didn't regret, but when I finished the top which I had been wearing underneath was completely damp - from sweat, I guess. Parents and George got roped into helping out with admin and I worried that they'd be cold and wet standing around, but they enjoyed themselves, fuelled by the spoils of an 8am stop at the excellent Yankalilla bakery on the way down there.
Total points on course (2170) looked like it would take about 41km to get them all, and I wasn't convinced that we would be able to do so, but Zara & I marked the map at each 7km anyway assuming that 7km would take us about an hour. We started off at pretty much the same running speed as the Kennedys and it took us the best part of an hour to shake them, by which time we were at the first 7km mark. After running across farmland and under quite a few electric fences (drop & roll) we were at the 14km mark slightly early but then wasted a few min on a control which was in exactly the right place on the spur according to the contours, but the vegetation boundary was marked 150m south of where it actually was, so lots of teams were looking for it in the pines north of the vegetation boundary, us included.
21km came up right on 3 hours but we were getting into the steeper stuff and after some rain the tracks were quite slick and clayey. Good thing we don't mind getting our feet wet! A thigh-deep creek posed no problems, and when, after meeting and chatting to the course setters at the water drop on the eastern edge of the map (Tom Bullock and Peter Clark did a great job; they said they set the course with us in mind), we spied their lurking photographer, we did our best to splash him as we raced through a middle-sized puddle. By now we had seen a few running teams heading the other way and deduced correctly that the part of the course still to come was quite a bit slower, as we'd covered more distance than them until that point.
28km was already just over 4 hours and I could tell I was slowing down as hamstring tightened and knee twinged and hills increased in frequency. A cross-country red-line took us through some of the soggiest tallest broom-bush in the vicinity (incidentally, I think Parawa had marginally less rain during the week than we did at home) and through a creek filled/lined with arum lilies. At 5 hours we were still 2km short of our 35km target, so dropped a 20 and a 50 near there, and acknowledged that we definitely weren't going to get the northwesternmost 30 and 40 (but we had never really expected to - when all the teams we passed on the course asked us "are you going to clean up?" we said "not sure yet!").
6 controls to get in the last hour meant we had to average less than 10 min for each in order to get back up the hill from the final control in time. Which we did with 7 min to spare in the end, but that wasn't enough to even out-and-back to a 20-pointer 800m away. We really couldn't have got any more controls; in the end we dropped only 4 of the 42, which was less than any other team dropped. So we won, by over 200 points, against some pretty tough teams, and were well pleased (also well satisfied after the excellent catering). Thanks to Zara for a great partnership and a grand day out in the countryside :)