Rogaining race 12:00:00 [2] 60.1 km (11:59 / km) +1475m 10:40 / km
shoes: Puma Faas 250 Trail
WA Champs 24hr Rogaine with Steve.
I was only in the last week leading up to this event that I started to realise just how unprepared I was. About a week before the event I had tried to get a bit of food that I might want to take on the rogaine but I didn't really know what I needed. I tried to research it a bit but didn't really come to any conclusions or go shopping again so was left with my box of muesli bars, the half a pack of fun-size snickers that I hadn't already eaten and a couple of left over gels that Rachel had. I had a couple of small packs of chips as well but wasn't sure if I should take them. When I saw Steve had some chips, I decided I could fit mine in too and also crammed in a couple more gels, muesli bars and mars bars that Steve had spare. For drinks I nearly filled my 1.5L bladder with water and had a 600ml bottle of powerade in one of my front pockets.
I wasn't sure what to wear either but eventually settled on a running t-shirt, long Aussie team O-pants, compression socks and Puma trail shoes with a long sleeve running top, waterproof running vest, tights, raincoat, beanie and gloves as warm gear for the pack. Still wasn't sure this was enough but when I added my main headlamp and smaller spare headlamp and torch to my pack it was starting to feel a bit overloaded so that settled it.
My only experience of planning a competitive 24hr was 11 years ago with Andy where I think we did a bit more than 100km with an hour and a bit to spare. That rogaine was almost all farmland so I tried to research what might be required in the bush and was disturbed to find Wil and Mark had done 116km straight line last year. I hoped that had a bit of farmland in it but didn't try to check just in case it didn't. Based on this I made up a string to measure 120km and made sure I measured it fully stretched to make sure I wasn't over ambitious.
When we got the maps the obvious starting point was to measure the full course and then work out where to go from there. I was really hoping it was going to be realistic to at least attempt to get them all because it would take away the whole problem of trying to assess what we were capable of. We tried to plan a route leaving as many low point controls near the hash house as possible to the end to be able to put off any decisions about dropping controls as long as possible.
Our first measure came out at about 113km and we got that down to 111km with a couple of little tweaks. This still seemed a little optimistic given reports of significant thicker sections but we hadn't pulled the string tight and others were saying you could do it in 103km so I remeasured a 10k segment and came up with 9.5km so maybe our route was nearer 105km straight line. Still seemed ambitious but close enough that we felt we had to attempt it at least until it was obvious we couldn't do it. Remeasuring our route after the event I came up with 103km straight line so I think our route choice was ok.