rogaining race (Paddy Pallin 6hr) 5:57:30 [3] 28.0 km (12:46 / km)
shoes: Asics GT-2000
"Sometimes you're the windshield; sometimes you're the bug"
(The Bug, by Dire Straits, from On Every Street, 1991. Nowhere near as good an album as any of their earlier work but the title track made it worth buying.)
Today I felt as flat as a bug on a windscreen, which was a pity, because I love rogaining, but I couldn't even muster up any enthusiasm for planning a route while we were sitting in the car watching the rain on the windscreen, having left Tracy's at 6am to get to Catherine Hill Bay ("Catho" to the locals) south of Newcastle. The map was deceptive; only about 3km wide in a strip between the old Pacific Highway and the coast, with the course basically divided into 2 halves by a narrow section with a new housing development being built on an old coal mine site meaning that you had to take the beach past it both ways. We planned to complete the southern section which included some cross-country legs in 'white' forest, and some out-&-backs on tracks through coastal heathland to coastal headlands, and then see what else we had time for, but I didn't have a good feel for how far this might be or how fast I could go.
Right from the start we were off the back of the pack running down the road to 23, and getting further behind by the minute. I didn't have the energy for the rock scramble along the beach below the cliff from 32 so just splashed through the incoming waves - wet feet don't matter! By the time we were heading out to 101 on the rock shelf beyond the 'island' Cath & Paula were already coming back from it and I knew there was no way I could keep up with them :(
But it also seemed that I had left my brain in the car, and was looking at the map & compass as though I'd never seen them before. Kept thinking that east was west, and north was south, and estimating distance as though it was a 1: 50 000 map, and I couldn't seem to go up hills, or down hills, which were 'slippery when wet' (not sure what shoes would have been suitable in this terrain; even trail shoes wouldn't really have helped on the clayey tracks. Perhaps O shoes? But my bad foot wouldn't have managed 6 hours in them). My teammate, while very patient, must have been thinking that he hadn't signed up just to drag around a second Navlight tag attached to a pair of legs with no head connected!
And I was thinking that I just needed to be home curled up in bed, which was such a pity, because I love rogaining, and 6 hours are my favourite...about 2 hours in, Blair basically asked if I needed to quit, and I said no, so he suggested that we leave off the SW corner, which was worth 340 points but involved some long cross-country legs, and do the coastal section sooner, then the 5km trek with no points back to the north part, and then see what we had time left to do.
It rained for the entire 6 hours, and I think I must be a fair-weather rogainer. I haven't been so wet since the NZ WRC in 2010! Might as well not have worn a raincoat because all it did was impede my running and the day wasn't actually that cold; plenty of people were just in t-shirts. Also the fundamental purpose of a raincoat is to keep things dry, whereas by the end I even had puddles inside my coat pockets, thereby completely dissolving my stash of salt tablets. But there came a point where it was just rather good fun to splash through the streams which had once been tracks, and admire the creeks which had turned into waterfalls among the rock shelves and palm trees.
And even though I was incredibly slow through the terrain, I turned back into a proper rogainer for the last 90 min, actually thinking about how much time we had left and which controls we could get depending on how long we took between them, and we finished off by getting a couple extra which was satisfying even if they were worth only 20 points each - in the end, the 8 controls we got after the Catho Pub still gave us 60 points less than the 4 down the SW corner would have done - and after the finish it was good to chat to Carolyn (tinytoes) while drinking hot pumpkin soup before wrestling my damp self into dry clothes before the drive back to Sydney. Since both Blair and I had booked 8:30pm flights there was enough leeway to not be stressed by the traffic jam encountered right at the entrance to the airport, but that's something which Geoff & I will have to keep in mind in 2 weeks' time.