We go trackside with team 94 (Steve Sullivan, Chris Graves and Bruce Greenhalgh) to get the inside running on the Minigaine.

While it doesn’t have the nation stopping status of the Melbourne Cup the recent ‘Glimpse of Gawler Stakes’ proved to be a worthy addition to the Spring Racing Carnival. A strong field of over 500 competitors took part in the event which was, of course, not just about racing, but also about the fashions! Chris Franklin and Paul Hoopman caught the eye with outfits that harkened back to a yesteryear of grace and charm. Our team chose an Hawaiian theme with grass skirts, Chris in his cutting-edge multicolored skirt, while Steve and I went for a more classic single tone look. Assured that my bum didn’t look big in my skirt we joined race goers at the starting gate for the final briefing. Naturally, given the standard of our couture we were hounded by the paparazzi (well, Richard Sprod took a photo). After the briefing, the final countdown, and then… we were off and racing!

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Not SARA’s rogaine reporter, Bruce Greenhalgh, as he alludes to matters literary in his report on the Ship-Tee-Shore 3 hour.

At one point during the recent Minigaine, my team (77) found itself heading along Port Road ‘to the lighthouse’ as my teammate, Jacob, noted.  This brought to mind one of the few novels I’ve read multiple times, namely Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the lighthouse’. I mentioned the novel to my team, but neither Kerstine nor Jacob had heard of it. Fair enough, I suppose, because while it’s quite a famous novel it’s not standard fictional fare. The action in the book is pretty much limited to a family’s trip to a lighthouse. It’s hardly an action packed read. It is, though, an exemplar of the ‘stream of consciousness’ style of writing in which an author attempts ‘to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass the mind’.

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Written by Bruce Greenhalgh (part of team 72 with Chris Graves and Craig Bettison)

As we finalised our route choice for ‘The Secret Garden’ minigaine I was reminded of a song from way back. It was Dave Warner’s from the Suburbs, Suburban boy. After flirting with the idea of tackling the lower slopes of Black Hill we decided to avoid the Black Hill controls completely. We figured we could spend all our time and energy in the suburban parts of the map, thus avoiding the time and energy sapping climbs required of a Black Hill visit. We were to be then, ‘suburban boys’ rather than bold bush walkers/trail runners.

I imagine we weren’t alone in this, but I suspect that not so many know of Dave Warners’ minor hit from the seventies. That’s a pity because it’s a good song and one that still resonates with me all these years later. Like ‘Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World and Ian Dury and the Blockheads’ Wake up and make love to me it’s at the antipodes to the usual pop song romantic situations and sentiments. So… you now know far more about my musical tastes than you ever wanted to know, and wasn’t this report supposed to be about rogaining?

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SARA’s roving reporter, Bruce Greenhalgh, shares his thoughts on 2022’s final rogaine – the West Side Story Minigaine

Lying on a concrete footpath isn’t something that normally has any appeal for me, yet immediately after November’s Minigaine it was not only all I wanted to do, but all I could do. I was spent. It’s true that I could have chosen to lie on lawn, but the grassed area in front of the Hash House had little breeze, and I needed a breeze, and walking to the oval beyond the car park where there was both breeze and lawn was beyond me. And as I lay there, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I was getting too old for this sort of thing.

And there was a clue, wasn’t there, in the name of the rogaine, West Side Story? A clue that it wasn’t an activity aimed at senior citizens? Anybody familiar with the musical will know it’s about young people; young people with the energy to dance, to fight, to fall in love, to dash around and do dramatic things. Just thinking about all that activity makes me pine for a cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down. I’m also led to consider that West Side Story is based on Romeo and Juliet and to contemplate the emotional freight carried by the young protagonists during the closing scene of Shakespeare’s play. In case you’ve forgotten what happens to the ‘star-crossed lovers’, Juliet takes a potion that makes here appear to be dead so as to avoid getting married to somebody who isn’t Romeo. Unfortunately, Romeo sees her in this death like state and thinking she has died and that life isn’t worth living without her, he tops himself. Then Juliet revives and does the same – an episode that has been described as ‘one helluva first date’. I ask you, is this sort of carry-on the territory of holders of a Seniors Card? Clearly not.

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