Huge Turnout, Innovation at Piha

Lactic Turkey 6/3hr Rogaine, 11 Jun 05

370 people took part in the 2005 Piha Rogaine on Saturday - a NZ record apart from the Canterbury World Championship event in 2000. Lactic Turkey Events which also runs offroad races and multisport events has run two or three rogaines in Auckland's Waitakere Ranges for four years now. Organisers Shaun Collins and Phil Wood do them well, with training sessions beforehand and good sponsorship, and people are obviously loving it.

But the crowning glory of the latest event is the "Raceviewer" software. This lets you "play" the event for up to 5 teams at a time on a computer, watching the little dots working their way across a background of either the topo map or an aerial photo! In fact the organisers were able to play the routes of the top three teams of the 3 and 6-hour courses on a big screen at the meal and prizegiving immediately afterwards!

Read more about the Racereviewer here, including downloading a copy with data for every Piha team. You can see where those near your own score went; or even if you weren't there you can check out the course! The software makes a fair few assumptions, mostly that team speed was constant and they took assumed track routes between controls, but its very impressive. Author Jody Snowdon says that known split times can be put in, so the potential is obviously there to take the file from an event with electronic controls and do even better! Pete Squires' electronic controls have been used in the Australian Champs as well as the NZ event at Middlemarch - the post-rog analysis is going to get real fun! Might even be better than doing the event...

Further comment on the event is on the orienteering forum www.maptalk.co.nz Full results are on the Lactic Turkey website. Lactic Turkey's next rogaine is at the Cascades (also in the Waitaks) on 2 July.


This page was written by and installed on 16 Jun 05