rogaining race (Ridgy Didge ARC) 11:30:00 [3] 30.0 km (23:00 / km)
shoes: Asics GT-2000
Aust Champs rogaine near Cooma with Alex Tyson. We hadn't rogained together for 15 years and obviously our fitness is a long way from when we came 3rd women's in the 2000 WRC in NZ, but we were well matched and it was easy to fall back into the old partnership. I'd been looking forward to this event because the photos on the website made it look like nice open forest, not too steep and with hopefully no nasty surprises - and so it proved. There were some subtle contours out there and a complex network of ridgelines and creeks, some with steep erosion gullies often skirted by strips of dense bushiness; much like the area used for day 2/3 of Easter 2016.
The HH was in the far west of the map, with an All Night Café pretty much in the middle, and 2 other water drops a few km north and southeast of there. We planned a loop of approx. 60km, trying to maximize the time/distance between water drops: around the NW perimeter to W2 in the afternoon, inner-northern loop to ANC in the evening, NE loop to W1 in the wee sma's then finishing off across the south in the morning with plenty of options for adding or subtracting controls near the end as time permitted. Speaking of time, I was surprised at how early we'd finished making our plan, but suddenly Alex told me it was 5 minutes to the briefing, and I still had to tape my ankles! Turned out that my watch had reset itself to SA time - it did that in NZ too :(
For the first 3 hours I felt great, strolling across the hills on a glorious autumn afternoon, but then my toenails started to become painful - wearing my oldest runners with holes in the sides should have meant that toes had lots of space but in fact the looseness of shoes meant that my socks bunched up around heels, compressing toes uncomfortably. Once I'd fed them some painkillers though, didn't notice hamstring at all.
Reached the water drop about 5pm and we got torches out in anticipation of the fast-falling darkness. Picked off controls pretty well in the night, although annoyingly made a couple of control-circle errors where my instinctive guess as to location was correct, but we checked the 'alternate facts' location first. Reached ANC before 11pm and so allowed ourselves half an hour there, both rearranging shoes & socks and I finally put on a 2nd layer - despite a frosty forecast, it turned out to be only a one-thermal night.