Written by Bruce Greenhalgh
Before most rogaines I usually spend a not insignificant amount of time musing, pointlessly, on the coming event. I try to figure out exactly what the weather will be like, imagine the terrain, ponder which of my many enduring ailments will plague me – that kind of thing. However, for the ‘Strath Sundowner’, the time and head space I have to devote to rogaining was taken up with two things that left me with no pause for wistful contemplation. Firstly, I was busy setting the course for April’s Velogaine (a great event, not to be missed) and I also had to find a team/partner for the Strath four hour.
Getting a team together should have been easy. I was a member of a team of three for last year’s November minigaine and it was understood that we’d likely team up again for coming events. Then injuries came along and left me, almost literally, the last man standing. I started asking around. I asked no less than six people to join me, but had no takers with the reasons for declining ranging from injuries to ‘I’m washing my hair that night’. So I ended up on SARA’s answer to Tinder, the Partner Matching Service. That’s when Doug Gillott contacted me. He’d lost his original partner through injury. (What is it about rogaining? It seems all you have to do is ask somebody to join your team and they end up with an injury. Should the sport come with a health warning?)
Anyway, Doug and I formed a team. I neglected to delete my partner matching entry and ended up with a request from Katherine (Kat) Pivetta. Thus, we became a team of three. It was a bit of an odd team with Doug and I being Ultra Vets with long histories in the sport and Kat a young Vet, essentially a novice. Doug and I hadn’t, of course, rogained with Kat and while Doug and I had teamed up previously, it was for a 24 hour event, a four hour is a quite different proposition. Despite all that we worked well as a team, including agreeing on a route choice for a map that was more than usually complex.
In warm, but not too warm, conditions we started with control 82 (south of the HH) and proceeded to travel in a roughly anti-clockwise direction around the course. Control 92 was our most northern control and from there we were, more or less, heading to the finish. The Angas Valley north of the HH – our route back – was rich in controls and quite confusing, especially with its Bermuda Triangle of controls 78, 56 and 66 where access was a real issue. We’d decided in our planning that for this section we’d ‘work it out when we got there’ unsure as to what sort of time we’d have left.
I’m not sure this was a great decision. We did use up a bit of time working out our route and, in particular, deciding to go for control 78 or not (we didn’t). I confess that for me making the end-of-rogaine time/distance calculations was made a little harder because, through setting the Velogaine (did I mention it is a great event and not to be missed?), I’d become used to a 1:50,000 scale and not the 1:15,000 scale of the Strath map. Perhaps we (I) could have done better in the last hour.
But I’m being picky. We collected all the controls we intended and a couple more and were back at the HH in time and in daylight. Which means that the description of the event as a ‘4Hr Twilight’ was a bit of misnomer. I can’t say I missed carrying a torch around in case it was needed for the last ten minutes, only to find it wasn’t required, but perhaps Kat should have experienced this particular quirk that was a feature of years gone by. Memories!
Still, the AGM and results were conducted in Twilight so… My thanks to all those who took on SARA positions and to all who helped create, run and pack up the Strath Sundowner. As they say in cycling circles, ‘Chapeau!’ (which reminds me that the next event is the Velogaine – a great event and not to be missed). Get a team together (the sooner the better)!
