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’.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to attempt a stream of consciousness rogaine report. A lot, a helluva a lot, goes through your mind when rogaining so describing it all would be a monumental task – more an unmanageable flood than stream – and beyond me. Not only would I need to describe the many and varied mental gymnastics involved in navigating, including the time/distance calculations (especially as you attempt to get back to the Hash House on time but not too early), but I would also have to depict the minor anxieties of searching for controls and the elations of finding them. I’d need to describe the cerebral processes involved in the monitoring of my pace and physical state as well as thoughts about how my teammates were going. Oh, and there should be mention of remembering to drink and keeping focused on progress and trying not to drift off too much. And if my mind did wander, well, the stream of consciousness style would require me to describe those distracting mind peregrinations.
Indeed, my mind was distracted in this particular rogaine by wondering what the many beach goers were making of three people with fairy wings running around in a vaguely lost fashion apparently looking for something. At least the fisher folk at the end of the Largs jetty knew what we after and were greatly entertained by our activity. Also, a little distracting and somewhat peculiar to this event was the variety of control descriptions. For bush rogaines there is mostly a limited lexicon: spur, gully, watercourse, track junction and etc – the usual suspects. For this minigaine the clues included ‘Time Ball Tower’, ‘A trio of emus’, ‘An anchor’, ‘Cherries’, ‘A rustic metal dome’, ‘E of Tugboat Fearless’ ‘Colourful pipes’ and ‘A musical bridge’. Different. Some of my head space was used trying to imagine what exactly we were set to encounter.
After a few hours of any rogaine my consciousness is drawn to questions along the lines of ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’ and, invariably, considerable thinking about aches and pains that are becoming more evident. While comparing our aches in the last hour of the event another novel came to mind. It was ‘All Passion Spent’ (actually, an apt description of how I usually feel at the end of a rogaine) by Vita Sackville-West who was a friend and lover of Woolf (probably explains why I thought of it). In the novel the main character, Lady Slane, presents the idea that in our later years we ought to befriend our ailments. The thinking is that our aches and pains aren’t going away; they are reliable and loyal and part of life – characteristics common to good friends – so why not treat them as friends? Indeed, Lady Slane developed an ‘affection’ for her ‘bodily ailments’. It’s a thought, and not a bad one, but I’d rather my injuries took a hike (and not with me on a rogaine).
My aches might remain; what did go away by the close of the event was the heat, one of the defining characteristics of this event. The temperature on the day of the rogaine was forecast to reach 35 degrees. That’s hot, and it was a worry, but cooling breezes kept conditions tolerable and it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Still, it was hot enough to affect our route choice. At one point we elected to travel along the Esplanade rather than Military Road solely on the basis that we’d get cooler breezes near the beach.
Fortunately, the forecast didn’t deter too many from competing, surely a testament to the enthusiasm and resilience of entrants. The forecast also made the volunteers efforts more meritorious. Running a rogaine in near century temperatures (old currency) can’t have been at all appealing. Yet the volunteers turned up and ran a good ship in spite of the weather. I thank them all for their unstinting efforts with special thanks to Shannon Packer, who made a great debut as a course setter.
* A play (later also a film) by Edward Albee.
