Bill Kennedy and I arrived at 11:30 pm on Friday night, 23 Hrs. after waking in NZ. Good training for a 24 Hr. Rogaine! On Saturday we were given our maps at 9:30, giving us about 2 hours to complete our planning before protecting the map with coverseal. Planning was difficult, as usual, with no obvious optimum route however far you wanted to go. Bill and I had done about 45 map kms at Queenstown in the 12 Hr event two weeks earlier, so we allowed a bit for darkness and fatigue and planned a 75 km route, but with plenty of shortcut options at the end. Just as well. The weather forecast was for the already cold and strong south-east wind to develop showers and then rain, so we took heavy parkas and extra clothing and food. For us old fogies, running was not the plot.
At noon, 430 people ran for their control cards pegged on a fence and disappeared in all directions. Many chose our direction, resulting in queues at the checkpoints until a few hills gave us a chance to outwalk most of them. Our plan was a large anticlockwise circle around the 1:40,000 map, with a big zigzag back in to the finish.
At our 10 km mark we were 25 minutes ahead of our 2:30 schedule. By the 20 km mark we were 10 minutes behind our 5 hr. schedule! The difference was the bush, instead of relatively open country. Now we were walking along roads for a km or so, before deviating into and out of the bush for a very subtly located checkpoint in some indistinct shallow gully. Our walking distance was nearly twice the map miles. Although we could see the inevitable revision of our plan looming, there was no obvious alternative plan so we continued bush-bashing along our route. The going was mostly pleasant; overcast, with a cool breeze, almost too cold except for the inevitable climbs up bush gullies. We started meeting the same people again and again, but at most unusual places and times. Darkness hit while we were in the middle of a particularly long and scrubby bush-bash of 2 km. Now it was well and truly compass and pace-counting work.
A track at last. We make good time for a while, with minor excursions into the bush, until we turn a slight mapping misinterpretation into a major blunder. We hit a stream in the wrong place and turned the wrong way – a classic goof. After much scrub we extricated ourselves and walked 1 km to a pine plantation handrail about 300 metres past the checkpoint and worked back.
The night was overcast, and dark in the bush. Another 3 checkpoints passed well, along with countless wombat holes, before we found ourselves in deep trouble. A major road we had been following came to an expected junction of a track and another road, but only two roads existed. We followed the left road. One and a half hours later we were back in the same spot, having worked out that the left road didn't exist except on the map, and we had followed the track which led us into unimaginable confusion. We weren't the only ones – we came across a lone person lying down in the middle of the track at the bottom of the hill. Nobody said anything. Eventually we tried again with more success after a bit of guidance from another team.
Now it was a simple checkpoint before the All Night Café, a sort of mini-hash house which had bread and jam and soup except they had run out by the time we arrived at 4:30 am. We were carrying far too much food anyway, so I gave them a packet of biscuits and a huge ham and cheese roll.
The next checkpoint provided me with the opportunity to demonstrate yet again my novel interpretation of a compass needle, in which the red end means "don't go" so the white end must be north. 'Nuff said, except that we had to return to the road and have another go from a completely different direction. It was interesting though; we found an emu-less emu nest and an unmapped road! By now dawn had arrived, about 4 hours ahead of schedule. We completed another two checkpoints to get to the extreme corner of the map, but on an old railway bed which climbed steadily for 13 kms back to the hash house.
Bill was starting to suffer from a swollen ankle caused by pressure from his gaiters, but we still made good time up the incline, collecting the checkpoints under the old trestle bridges as we went. We had enough time to gather another 100 points in the vicinity of the hash house, giving us a final total of 2000.
This wasn't enough the win the Super-Vets section; we needed 2230. Instead, we came second, 8th. Vet team, and 15th. overall from 170 teams. Even without our goofs in the night, we wouldn't be fast enough to beat Tim Dent and Rob Taylor from Victoria, who finished 9th. overall.
Vivienne Prince and Lara produced an outstanding finish with 1490 points which gave them first family team and third woman's team. The only other kiwi I recognised was Alan Stow, who together with Adrian Bradford scored 1410 points. David Baldwin, Adrian Sheppard, and David Singleton (ACT) were the overall winners on 2910 points with a commanding lead of 250 points over the second team.
Results can be viewed on the VRA website.
Overall, the event was a typical VRA success, with meticulous organisation and great
country and truly outstanding competitors. For the map-minded, it was 1:40,000,
measuring 410 mm by 450 mm, with 10m contours on the left side of the map and 20m
contours on the right side.