Rachel Grindlay

Lauren has almost deposed Tom as my most frequent rogaine partner, certainly the most frequent of recent years. This was our third Lake Macquarie 12 hour event on the trot. Being of a competitive nature there was a bit of nervousness at the start – we had won the women’s division the previous two years so of course I felt like we needed to ‘defend’ the (not overly illustrious) title. However things weren’t looking good – we’d both been less active over winter than we normally are, and were coming in a bit underdone. That, combined with the rain forecast, meant I felt we needed our opposition to not perform, for us to have any chance of winning (I was going to say placing… but with only 5 Women’s Teams in the 12 hour, I felt like we should probably place!).

It was constant rain, with large amounts of standing water on the Pacific Highway, as I drove to the rogaine on Saturday morning. This didn’t bode well for the day ahead, and I was already contemplating whether we should just face reality and switch to the 6 hour division. Fortunately by the time I picked up Lauren and we got to the Hash House near Mt Sugarloaf it had stopped raining. In fact, there was blue sky and sunshine! So much sun that I even felt the need to put on sunscreen before we started.

As usual we were pretty cavalier with our planning. One of these days maybe we’ll get string and forensically add up points in each section… but gut feel seems to get us through most of the time. I was a bit disappointed that the 12 hour didn’t start at 10am, an hour before the 6 hour event, as it had last year (both so we could get to bed earlier, and to avoid the masses at the start). But it was good to see a lot of friends doing the 6 hour who I missed completely the previous year.

We planned a highly optimistic course given the state of our fitness. Though after the first couple of hours I was wondering if it was possible, as we had been pretty spot-on with our nav – even out-navigating a legendary team to get to 101 before them!

However, things went slightly adrift for 52 (went up a spur too early) and then 77 (went looking up when we didn’t need to). And while looking for 77, the rain arrived.

Having lost a bit of time we decided to not bother with 61 and it was time to leave the valley and head back up on to the mountain. I could feel all the little used muscles in my body protesting as we marched up the 300m climb to 93, and then demanding a stop to stretch before pushing on to 84. The way I was feeling then I didn’t think there was any way we would be out for the full time.

Once we were up on the road we had do decide what to do next. My body was telling me we needed to cut some of the optimistic plan out. Decisions made (cutting the southern most controls), we then went on to have an embarrassing series of navigational fails while on the main road. It’s always the bloody roads and tracks that screw up your navigation. If any one asks, it took us 38 minutes to get from 71 to 62 because we were analysing route options and making decisions… nothing to do with walking out towards Mount Vincent or missing the track down to 64 (twice).

Things went reasonably well after that, though with some interesting patches of lantana and 3m high creek banks to negotiate between 109 and 98.

The rain, which had slacked off, intensified again around 5pm bringing about dark conditions earlier than we might have hoped. As we clawed our way up the steep and slippery track from 76 – 89 we passed another team on their way down. They suggested we’d need ropes to get up – fortunately our canyon bridging skills came to the fore as we found little rocky protrusions to balance on rather than trying to get purchase on the steep wet clay.

A couple more small errors at 79 (didn’t keep going up the gully but followed the track), and 42 (went wandering far too far down the old track) were remedied without wasting too much time. But given the amount of cumulative time we had wasted over the course of the day we knew it wasn’t our best outing.

Hoons along the fire trails were offputting, and took away from the ambience of the event. We weren’t that surprised to see the police turning up a bit later on!

Getting up to control 80 atop Mt Sugarloaf gave me flashbacks of a recent trip Tom & I had done to Mt Keira. Tom & I had taken a route marked on OpenStreetMap, only to find ourselves stuck beneath a fence once we were below the summit. Fortunately in that case we were able to wriggle under a small gap in it. But in the case of Mt Sugarloaf there was a layer of cliffs plus a fence protecting the summit. I chose the wrong way to circumnavigate to the access route so we did almost a full circumnavigation of the peak before finally getting on top. There was a nice break in the weather, so we had the full moon and views out over Newcastle.

Buoyed by cream buns from Tea & Damper, and knowing we were unlikely to be under much time pressure, we didn’t have (too) many problems with our final 7 controls on the way back to the Hash House. Not long after we got back the rain started coming down in earnest so we grabbed some food and then headed home – glad to be in dry clothes and having no idea where our result fitted. More hoons were doing burn-outs at the top of the road the Hash House was on, so they had to be avoided.

We were most pleased and surprised to see the results the next day and find we’d managed to do all right for ourselves – 1st in the Women’s Division and 7th overall (following 1st in the Women’s Division and 6th overall in the previous two years).

The GPS log had us doing about 35km in our 11h 25 on course.

Results