By Meredith Norman, one half of the winning team

Camilo and I usually find ourselves competing against each other in rogaines, but this time we decided to team up for the four-hour event in Strathalbyn, one of our few opportunities to race together this year. I had previously visited Strathalbyn a few times; the most memorable was for breakfast in the Town centre with Joe Milne and Josie Smernik as we walked 53kms from Highland Valley to Goolwa.

I was looking forward to this rogaine particularly after bumping into the enthusiastic course setter Guy Schubert, a few weeks earlier at orienteering. He was eagerly enticing us to enter the event. I briefly skimmed the entry list prior to the rogaine and saw there would be many fast teams – I knew we’d have our work cut out for us!

In my last rogaine with Camilo, I accidentally packed two left shoes (silly I know) so I was meticulous when packing the rogaine gear for this event. Given the warm weather, I packed plenty of water, electrolytes, a filling lunch and a left and right shoe!

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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?)

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By Bruce Greenhalgh

As a frequent contributor to the rogaine email newsletter I now find myself contemplating ideas for reports even before the rogaine is run. ‘The Lakes District’ rogaine, for example, had me entertaining ideas of weaving into a report references to the famous Lake District in England (ignoring the plural/singular discrepancy). I was thinking, in particular, of the poet William Wordsworth who is associated with the Lake District and perhaps contrasting some of his well-known lines about wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’ and discovering ‘golden daffodils’ to the travails of rogaining. On starting the rogaine another contrast presented itself too, that of comparing the beauty of, say, Lake Windemere in England to the first body of water we encountered which was, of course, the Mount Barker effluent ponds. However, the problem with this angle is that while I acknowledge Wordsworth’s place in literature I don’t actually like his work much and so writing about it held little appeal. I also suspected that too many tenuous references to poetry and faraway lakes might turn readers off.

Not to worry, there was always the coincidence of the Twilight rogaine and the State election and so the possibility of writing about rogaine control corflutes that I wanted (desperately) to find as opposed to those election corflutes that I wish would go away. Again, though, there were problems with this theme in that I suspected that a lot of people would be thoroughly sick of election dribble by voting day and reading anything even tangentially about the election would not be appealing.

I’m left then, with the fact that Steve Sullivan and I won (something that occurs with only slightly more frequency than sightings of Halley’s Comet) and trying to anticipate what readers might like to hear from the winners. There is nothing new about a winner writing an event report. Indeed, for a long time it was expected and routinely completed. Those reports often featured detailed descriptions of astute route choice consummated by athletic prowess, intelligent navigation and helpings of grit and determination. As a winner I can attest that those sorts of things are important, but I also have to admit that a win has a lot more to do with luck. Yep. Luck.

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