CNYO Rogaine 2018
My first 24hr rogaine!
We've eyed this race since we started orienteering since we both grew up in this area, but this is the first time we were able to swing it. We had a bit of unplanned excitement when the car developed a terrible rattling sound 10 miles from home on Friday night, which we had to juggle to a dealership on Saturday morning before the race (Thanks to my parents for being extremely helpful dealing with it and lending us a car). We got to race HQ a little later than we had planned, and that coupled with not being able to park in the same place as the gear drop/planning area meant it was a little more hectic than we prefer pre-race. Without seeing the map we planned to make a pit stop at HQ for refueling at about the 2/3 mark, which let us run smaller packs with less food. Luckily, this plan panned out well once we saw the map. Planning wasn't too frantic since we had 2 hours, but we had to guess at how far we thought we might make it, and we needed to copy the plan to 3 maps and turn one in to the organizers in case of emergency, which added a little time. We decided to mark our goals as approximately 3.5 scalex miles (following approximate route) every 2 hours. We figured that would be closer to 5 actual miles which we should be able to achieve at a good walking pace. The race notes said it may be clearable - so of course we planned to clear it and our 3.5 mile/2 hour estimates worked out to exactly 24 hours... It sounded like most people planned to go NW first to clear the shorter, point dense region first, but we opted to go SE first to come back to HQ at ~2/3. Being relatively alone in the woods suited us just fine.
We headed off at noon with a group of 3-4 other teams, until we realized we had forgot the GPS logger in the action packer and decided to turn around to get it, giving us a ~3 min delay right from the get go. We still caught up to the last of these teams by the first control. The first ~9 hours in the light went fantastically, with only a few small bobbles:
48, 33, 42, all went well.
89 - we expected the cairn to be huge to make it on a 1:30k map, but it was normal sized and well camoflaged in the green woods, and our bearing wasn't perfect so we had to canvas a bit.
35 - was on a very broad hill top and we just missed the apex on the first pass. relocated from the trail past it.
89 - was on an unmapped track. Luckily syd was peering off in the woods and spotted it from the mapped track, or this could have been a big confusion.
59 - tried to follow the property line, but missed a few blazes and drifted high, but it worked out.
58, 77, W4, 43 all went well.
43 - We found it okay but got in the hashed green leaving and never found the mapped trail.
55, 67, 76 all went well
49 - I FORGOT TO PUNCH :(. I half expected this to happen with needing to punch and sign the intention sheet, but I tried to be very careful and punched a number of them twice when I couldn't remember. Need to make it practice to punch first, but its easy to forget when the clipboard is hanging in front. We also happened across a number of teenagers with guns in the woods, which was a little unnerving.
66, 45, 36, 87, W5, 75 all went well.
86 - we caught up to team TerriYaki (SnailTrail + Omaps) on the road towards 86 and chatted a little bit. We had been slowly gaining time on them on the last 4-5 controls, but hadn't seen their name before that, so we discussed the differences in our initial routes and future plans. We were dreading the giant hill to 86, but it actually wasn't too bad. We put our headlamps on when we got there (a little preemptive), and they caught up to us at the control due to our delay. Then we headed down to the 'worst' control, while they continued north.
46 - I call this the worst control because it was an out and back that required 2 giant uphills for only 40 points. Found it fine though.
The road slog to W3 was long and boring and we got to watch the darkness descend and got sprinkled on. We were feeling overall pretty good, but decided that jogging would be more pain (present and future) than benefit.
After dark we started having a few more problems. Nothing too major, just bobbles and hesitations.
76 was fine.
34 - we took the stream bed north. Due to the distance, we made a time estimate to get to the pipeline field, but we didn't account for the slowness of travel so once we passed the time estimate we started to panic and slowed down even more. There were also a decent amount of stinging nettles to navigate. Saw Jerkface/GG in this part. Finally made it to the pipeline and continued without a problem.
83 - We took the pipeline for a ways and then took a bearing. I pace counted, but came up very short (this would become a theme), and again started to panic. Luckily syd was relatively confident and talked through her thoughts, and we continued on to find the control without too much trouble.
63 - Took the wrong stream bed too far North.
37 - no problem
12 hours in and still feeling pretty good physically. I had slight R heal pain and L shin pain, so I took an ibuprofen which helped a lot. At this point we had put up about 15 or so minutes on most of our 2 hours estimates, so we were about 1.5 hours ahead of schedule for clearing it. We were also REALLY REALLY good about food and electrolytes through this entire half... More on Sundays log.