rogaining race (Hawthorndene 4 hr) 3:59:24 [3] 30.3 km (7:54 / km)
shoes: Asics GT-2000
Twilight rogaine with Andrew Kennedy, starting from Hawthorndene Primary. Took a while to plan our route thanks to Zara's diligent setting! We looked at the cluster of controls around the pine forest immediately south of the hash house but said "leave until last" as we weren't intending to head out up Olave Hill Road, planning originally for the Suffolk Rd ascent but then during the briefing changing this to a less steep route along the creek in Belair NP (overshot 52 on a teepee, but 41 on the railway dam was easy). 85 was partway up a spur on the southern side and we'd intended to come back down to the creek and along the valley to 53 on Amphitheatre Rock but when the control seemed higher up the spur than anticipated we continued up to 37 on the park boundary, along and down to 53 which was dangerously placed at the top of the cliff rim but I didn't have to go closer than 5m from it as AK had the Navlight tag.
Annoyingly, overshot the turnoff to 80 which was on a spur in bushland off Hilltop Drive, by running too far down the road because the map didn't differentiate between private land and public access. Next few off Upper Sturt Rd were good and we got to 94 under the big oak tree by the railway line on Station Rd right on 90 min. Up to Sheoak Rd and down into the park; a steady descent past 81 (climbed back out of here to Jubilee Drive rather than going down through the blackberries to the control on the old railway station), 74 on the old fire tower, 90 which was a man-made rock feature some people may remember from the NOL races, across to 93 (I stacked it on the way but thank goodness the ground was still soft from Thursday's rain) 61 on Lower Waterfall, 42 and 63 either side of Echo Tunnel.
Now, it's admittedly my fault that we did the Brownhill Creek loop, but we had felt in the planning phase as though there might not be enough else to do if we didn't commit to it. Descent down Pony Ridge on the switchback singletracks always takes a little while but it should be a good run down the road from there, right? Apart from control 82 perched up the hill in an olive grove, that is, and of course the ascent back up from the creek to Sheoak Rd, which turned out to be a string of pink tapes through seedling pines rather than an actual trail, and to involve approx. 170m ascent. Which I did know, but the contours on the map were fairly faint and so this hadn't really registered with us...anyway this loop took us about an hour rather than the 45 min I'd been hoping for and so after getting the controls at Belair Station and on the tiny maze nearby we had approx. 35 min left and it was important to get the ones on Minno Creek because the 3 controls on mosaic tables gave an extra 60 bonus points between them. Ended up going 45, 65, 44, 55, 47, 32, 30, almost on map memory by this time because it was too dark to read the map properly, and we got in & punched the finish unit with 30 sec to spare :)
Or so we thought...after the long queue for everyone to reach the download table and where every single team had to report a minimum of 2 controls where the Navlight hadn't worked and so the poor admin people had to record all these and adjust the scores manually for 130+ teams, we waited and waited for the results and were surprised that the score which was read out for us didn't match what we thought it would be; we were supposedly 24 sec late and lost 10 points, despite both of us having 3:59:something on our watches. (Might have been because the event in fact started 2 min late? I suspect that everyone else who finished in the same minute as us was docked 10 points also). Anyway, it didn't really matter because we were the best part of 100 points behind John & Lauren, who'd been smart enough to skip Brownhill Creek and started out with the pine forest then up Olave Hill, and covered a couple of km more than us because they were running faster.