Yes, this was 4 weeks ago, but it was my first big sporting event in New Zealand. In fact it turns out that it was the largest event of it's kind ever held in NZ. Piha 06 Race Report
For those of you unfamiliar with the sport of orienteering, a rogaine is an orienteering meet in which you can visit checkpoints in any order you like. There is a time limit, and checkpoints are worth varying numbers of points depending on their difficulty. Whichever team collects the most points within the time limit wins.
The race we did was 3 hours, we pulled in 350 points, placing us in the lower part of the men's open division, but solidly in the middle overall.
The race was held in Piha, on the west coast about an hour from Albany. It's one of New Zealand's surf beaches. Very cool area, I'll definitely have to head back there sometime. After several days of rain, the course was quite muddy. People climbing and sliding around ahead of us had churned everything into a sticky mess and made all the downhills into slides. Good fun!
That said, after stopping to check out the beach on the way home I'm not sure why it seemed like a good idea to spend the day scrambling over slippery rocks and roots in the Waitakere bush when we could have been running on the beach. ;-)
File Under: Adventure Racing,
"After several days of rain, the course was quite muddy. People climbing and sliding around ahead of us had churned everything into a sticky mess and made all the downhills into slides. Good fun!"
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like one of the Grateful Dead shows I went to in Wisconsin. It rained like a mofo, and there were some crazy hippies sliding down the hill!