Rachel Grindlay

Lauren and I teamed up for our second Lake Macquarie Rogaine. A relatively small map meant we picked up over 85% of the available points, and the winners cleared it with 3 hours to spare!

There were lots of fire trails and motorbike tracks which meant there wasn’t that much cross-country navigation. We tried to take any opportunities available to us to get off the roads, but in the northern section in particular, you didn’t really want to be off the tracks in some of the heavily vegetated sections.

That said as the map was generated using LIDAR there was still plenty of subtle navigation needed – plenty of minor gullies just waiting to trick the unobservant.

It was unseasonably warm for winter – a high of 26°C made for thirsty walking and taxed bodies unconditioned for the heat. At one point I had to take my gaiters and gloves off just to get more air flow on my skin. We enjoyed the brief cooler periods we had when we crossed some of the larger creeks and entered another (cooler) world.

In the northern section of the course there was a ridgeline with 2 controls – but warning from the course setter that you couldn’t walk along the ridgeline as there were impassable cliffs. Lauren and I entertained giving it a go since we are both competent scramblers – but in the end opted for the road, which was just as well as the cliff was a sheer 10-15m drop. There was no chance of getting up that.

Despite being on the road I had the brilliant idea of climbing up to the cliffline and walking along the base of it. The vegetation was white on the map so should be fine – right? Instead we found ourselves in lantana hell. Fortunately we weren’t the only team silly enough to think this was a good idea. Brendan and Rachel ended up in front of us and did a bit of the work, until Rachel got herself immersed so heavily in one thicket she didn’t seem to be going anywhere and I found an alternative way round. Eventually we fought our way round and rejoined the track we could have taken – probably only lost 10 minutes or so, but gained plenty of lantana grazes to show for it.

One unusual feature of the course was that it was being used for an adventure race on the same day. The mountain bike section started in the evening while the 12-hour teams were still out. The controls for both the adventure race and the rogaine were exactly the same flags – just a different control stamping mechanism. We came across at least 3 instances where the adventure race control and the rogaine control were within 50m of each other – just another way to keep you on your toes!

The course had a plenty of opportunity for running. Lauren and I ran for exactly none of it, so I wasn’t sure what that was going to do for our result. As it turned out our nav must have been on point since we managed to top the Open Women’s division and come in sixth overall (coincidentally the same results as last year).

The GPS log had us covering 42km in our 11h 45 on the course. We had a couple of ‘medium’ navigation mishaps – probably costing us 10 minutes or less each time – though with an extra twenty minutes (to add to the 15 we came in early) we might have made it into fifth overall!?

Results