Spent six hours today suffering my first
rogaine. This is basically a combination of cross-country running/walking and navigation; rather like orienteering but points-based and teams only. The idea is that you have six hours to cover as much ground as you can, finding as many checkpoints as possible. The more difficult the terrain or the further away from home base a checkpoint is, the more points are awarded.
Todays event was held in the Blue Mountains and required much travelling along bush tracks and cross-country scrub-bashing through often thick scrub and forest. It was mighty tough in places, let me tell you. And it doesn't help when you miss the water points either.
But it's a lot of fun, although damn tricky to do properly (you need to be very good with map and compass - GPS is forbidden and many of the checkpoints are very hard to find in dense scrub). My team didn't even come close to worrying the leaders in the veteran's division we were in. But it's fantastic training, as it's mainly an endurance event with loads of hills and rough tracks. I loved it, although I should have been better prepared to avoid the dehydration. Fortunately it was not a hot day so all was well in the end. I also need to get some decent off-road shoes - my Brooks Adrenalines really didn't handle the conditions that well today!
One of the nice things about rogaining is that the organisers seem to make a special effort to send you into interesting places. One of the checkpoints today was an aboriginal rock art site - the photo below shows some 1600-year old cave painting: not something you see on your average jog around the block!
The other photo shows me at the start (I'm on the left, the other guy is my brother-in-law and one of the team, Rob): I wasn't so happy six hours later I can tell you.
But a great day - give it a go sometime.
No! No! November...
