rogaining race (SA Champs) 11:52:00 [3] 30.0 km (23:44 / km)
shoes: Asics GT-2000
At about 1am, Zara & I were verrry carefully following up a creek in the mallee in search of a side gully almost too small to be visible on the map, when we were accosted by a mixed team who wanted to know where they were, and even when I explained that I thought we were within 200m of the control, they were so spooked by having gone in circles that they didn't believe me and went off in the opposite direction. We overshot the control a little but it was easily fixed; they never found that control (nor a couple of other 80s or 90s; they were fitter than us, but had a really bad night).
My bad part of the night came a couple of controls later when we followed a big creek, looking for two side branches close together and then cutting across the broad spur to the next creek then up a little side spur. We did this, but found ourselves above a gully/creek which petered out. Dropped back down and tried again. After a 3rd go we found ourselves back where we had started out half an hour ago, and the penny dropped: we were still 500m upstream from where we needed to be. By the time we found this control it was 3am and I really just wanted to go home to bed and never go rogaining again. I said as much to Zara, who looked a bit startled and talked me out of such a thought without too much difficulty although she also had to convince me that the next few legs around the sides of Mt Plantagenet weren't going to be as fearsomely steep as they looked.
And actually, they weren't too bad because we followed the ridgelines and found the controls cleanly. Just as the sky was beginning to lighten at 6am Zara spontaneously begged for a 10 minute nap. I had been expecting this because she did it at Nackara, and had been steeling myself to say no, but suddenly it seemed like a worthwhile idea and after all, we'd already lost over an hour during the night and were probably an unsalvageable distance behind our original schedule. It wasn't even cold; I just put my 3rd thermal under my head and closed my eyes for long enough to dream something weird.
The first control after dawn was nice, on a little knoll, and then we legged, I mean shuffled, it along the track to water and were at an 80 by 0815 and made the reluctantly prudent decision not to try for a 90 as it was still about 15km back to the hash house and there could be nasty surprises even though the route looked straightforward. It was pretty straightforward though and we had time for an extra 30 before jogging in with nearly 10 min to spare. The surprise came at the presentation when it turned out that we'd won by 300 points! OK, so it was a small field, and the men's team who came second were much cleaner than us in the night but also they were back at the hash house for 3 hours, otherwise they would likely have beaten us. So I am very grateful to Zara for convincing me to persevere and to Evelyn for providing me with ankle tape :)