Heights of Winter Rogaine - 18th June

Well being defending champs Nathan and I had a fair idea we would be watched closely this year. The day began as per usual with a route planning session in the Culverden school hall. Its not normal for a team to obtain every control on a Rogaine map, in fact usually the top team will nail about 75% of them. This map looked different. At a glance it looked possible to collect the lot in which case the top team would be the ones to collect them the quickest. So.....we planned our path with this in mind, setting hourly targets as a guide to see if we were on track.

And heres what actually happened in short form...

We fell short by miles! But it didn't become apparent until well into the allocated 12hours. We had a great time in daylight, collecting everthing possible. Come 6pm however darkness provided some hefty challenges. The only features that could be relied on were the contours (rather difficult to make out). Marked streams were swamps and hard to distinguish, all man made features were inaccurate (except pilons) and we were on the foothills/ river flats so contours themelves were hard to judge. So in summary we lost major ground at night and ultimately the ability to defend our title. It came down in the end to strategical errors namely too much time wasted for small points early in the day and we left ourselves too much challenging navigation for the dark hours.

Safe to say we'll be back again next year much more the wiser! Check out the worm below. It tells a great story of the day. Many thanks to La Sportiva for providing me with crosslite shoes which provided insane grip on the grassy hillsides and amazing comfort. Legend Rogaine shoes I have to say.