rogaining race (WRC 2016) 11:30:00 [3] 30.0 km (23:00 / km)
(sick) shoes: Keen trail shoes
When I woke up this morning I felt about 30%, and Zara did have an offer to join a couple of other teams but she wasn't keen to cramp their style, and just before map handout time I went through the motions of putting on my O gear, figuring that if I was going to be "well" enough to keep an eye on Eleanor (who had fallen in love with the inflatable Aussie boxing kangaroo and she & I held hands with it being dragged around the hash house for a while) I was probably well enough to start the rogaine although had no idea what I'd be like at 3am or even how I'd go up the first big hill.
Wasn't very helpful to Z during the planning phase, which went all too quickly - just kept muttering in shock about how the map was waaay too big and we'd only be able to cover 50% of it at most, so the question was which 50% given that the HH was in the SW corner and surrounded by some huge linear ridges meaning that the control placements nearby were limited. Although in fact, in many other parts of the map the controls were also over 2km apart. The other important factor to take into account was water, about which the competitors had been warned - plenty of water drops along the track running E-W through the middle of the map but none at all in the NE corner of the map or on the southern escarpment, because it just was't possible to get water drops into those areas. So it was no good planning a big loop to get all the high points in these areas if that would mean dehydration. At least the forecast was only for 21 on Sat/Sun, but the sun always seems warm in the afternoons in Central Australia.
As we were assembling for the briefing Kay mentioned that the NW corner was nice and I said that I'd been wanting to do that first up so that it would be a few more hours until we refilled with water and so Zara said ok and we turned the plan, such as it was, on its head. Very slow out of the start, shuffling on the road with all the other teams, and I wasn't even bright enough to suggest shortcutting across the floodplain on the way to 61. Through 61, 42, 96, 110, 41, 62, 81, 36, 54 we were very slowly gaining on teams who had started out much faster than I was capable of going, and at the water drop near the Sphinx had actually caught up with the Colwells and Chris & Karen, but then sat down with the trusty piece of string for a 20-minute planning session!
Basically, we were heading into the mid-northern spinifex section with the intention of picking the best bits out of it (and most of the points in there were pretty good, whereas along the northern rim they were interspersed with lower points) and seeing how much we could do of the NE section depending on time - so we were going to rethink again about midnight, by which time we had managed to do 91, 72, 112, 84 (following a creek line very carefully and getting our torches out partway through), 116 (steep scramble up a hill face with a bit of bouldering which made me very thankful for my grippy shoes, especially when having to retrieve first Zara's hat and them my map which rolled down the hill - the huge map was very springy when folded and kept wanting to escape from my hand. Compass thumb is now numb from holding on so tightly to it!), 82 which seemed to take forever because of suboptimal route choice, but actually many of the night legs took well over an hour, 48 (subtle gap in the hills which I really enjoyed navigating to), 117 incorporating my usual 11pm mental slump where I do dumb things navigationally, but it could have been a lot worse.