rogaining race (SA Champs) 11:51:00 [3] 44.0 km (16:10 / km)
shoes: Asics GT-2000
I had a bit of a flat patch about 1am where I just couldn't seem to follow the same bearing as Steve, but once I'd worked out that my headlamp slips sideways slightly and so I was following its beam not my compass, and had consumed a couple of coffee lollies and some Nurofen for my feet, plus convinced Steve to do the same, we trotted along quite nicely for the next few hours, although a little underdressed for the conditions - I hadn't expected a clear night and so it was more like 4 degrees than the forecast 9. It was pretty quiet with him focusing on pace counting and not talking much so my mind was free to think about how lucky I am to live in a country where I have the disposable income to 'waste' on such an activity and where it's socially acceptable for me to go off and spend a weekend in the company of a man other than my husband.
The moon came up about 2am, a huge blood-red crescent hanging over the lights of Whyalla. Eerie, but not of any use to us navigationally, and we had managed quite well without it so far - there was enough starlight to see the outline of small hills but we had to intuit the existence of valleys. About 5:30am, though, we didn't correctly intuit that we had hit a creek below the control, because the blue line was marked as existing only above the control - and so we turned downstream without first checking just a little bit to the left as we had usually done in each control circle. It was bloody freezing, and we hurried down the creek without thinking much about the distance until we hit a fence nearly 600m from the control. Swore a little, headed back upstream for 750m, punched the control, headed downstream shivering for 750m, crossed the fence and I suggested to Steve that we follow it to where it bent, on the way to the next control. He said we should be all right with a straight bearing because the control would be on a track.
Well, we never saw the track, and Steve & I got sort of separated... we regrouped properly about 500m past where the track should have been and admitted to each other that the only option was to head to the fence and go in from the bend. The track should have gone off from the bend, but it truly didn't exist there any more, and even at the control it was pretty indistinct. Still, it was daylight by now, so we could work this out. Also we were at nearly the 75km mark and needed to find a few more controls than originally planned, over the next few hours, tempting as it would have been to take our aching feet back to the hash house about 4km away. There were some high pointers in the NE corner but they averaged 2-3km apart and Steve was the one feeling vague at this point, but I knew we could do it if I could just remain focused. It really was beautiful country with red sandy soil and casuarinas, myall and flowering eremophila bushes, and there was nowhere else I would rather be just then, not even the HH.
We were one of only 3 teams to go to control 94, 'the spider' which was a network of channels draining into a dam about 5km north of the hash house. Lost a bit of time here because we crossed the track about 400m NE of the dam but thought we were a bit closer to it than that. Still, relocated quickly and then slogged south on the track, with the sandiness really grating at Steve's underfoot blisters. Starting to wonder why we hadn't seen the Doses at all; Steve said that in the night they hadn't yet been through any of the controls we were at, but surely they must come through us soon. And indeed we saw them going the opposite way to us between the next couple of controls; they looked like they were running, but clearly they must have lost a lot of time somewhere, and we started to think that maybe they hadn't cleaned up after all, and that we might be in with a chance of beating them. So I pushed poor Steve to a final 20 points, with him warning me that we had to find it spot on, because he wouldn't be able to run into the finish if we were going to be late!
In the end, we won by over 400 points, and Steve turned to me and said "We didn't need to go to 21 after all!" Well, if you put it that way, I guess we could have come in at breakfast time...but on the other hand, if we hadn't lost nearly an hour pre-dawn, we could have gone to 31 and 44 as well. As it was, we got all but 6 controls and only left out 170 of the 3940 points on offer. Not bad for a team who walked the whole thing?
The best bit was that I had convinced George to fly to Whyalla - there was a flight which got in at 3:30pm - and drive us home, because Steve & I were pretty wrecked and could hardly walk once the endorphins wore off. And of course, this gave George the right to laugh at us every time we staggered/hobbled in and out of the car when we stopped (for junk food).
But it was a really good rogaine, one of my favourites in terms of terrain and conditions, I'd say. I've been wanting to do a 24 hour with Steve for ages and he didn't disappoint :)