To celebrate 15 years of matrimonial harmony (!) Tom and I arranged to compete against each other at Whangamata Adventure Race. I've got the adventure race team, all fairly experienced and focussed. Tom has his hockey team. They've actually taken it fairly seriously and been for a couple of runs in their two weeks of preparation.
Round 1 is a 3 hour MTB rogaine. I talk to the course setter to check for areas that I should avoid with fairly new MTBers. And promptly go off and plan to head to those areas, although at Rochelle's encouragement we drop our bikes to run the loop 100-101. I'll go back to ride it one day! As per usual we head away from the congestion and ride into the navigation heading straight out to the Mystery Activity and beyond to the checkpoints furthest South. Approaching CP 100 we are running low on time, and head straight down through 26 - finishing a good 5 minutes late and losing lots of our points!
After soup, sausages and fruit for lunch, it's an awkward feeling to head back out for round two - a 3 hour trek rogaine. We worked bloody hard in the morning, we think we are ahead of the boys despite our penalties, and have offered a bribe to the race organiser. The boys are looking mighty slick heading out for this one - intimidating even.
CP 21 had been used in a race previously and Chelle and I couldn't find it, so took great pleasure in pipping a number of teams to this one. Heading out to 52 was some loose nav, allowing myself to be drawn away from a compass bearing by the teams ahead. A big climb and we ended up behind the boys - chasing Cam's bright orange top which could be seen kilometres away. The MA was a tangram puzzle - quick result as I've been working on these with one of my students laterly! CP 53 no worries, then again didn't take a compass bearing, followed the wrong ridgeline down after other teams and spent a long time in the wrong place for CP 54. Feeling behind the game, we took a shortcut to head out to CP 31 and followed Tom's team into the dreaded Swamp for CP 104. Less than 20m in, as we watched them hauling themselves through blackberries and plunging thigh deep into manky swamp water, we headed back to the road, crossed the stream, hit the forest on the north side and ambled in to the CP. This was a highlight of the race, an easy walk while we listened to the blokes tacking the swamp metres away. Although, I think the swamp was a highlight of their race as well - it certainly sounded like they were having a great adventure!
We detoured on the way back to collect a couple of CPs not far away, totally misjudged the distance to the finish line and were 20 minutes late with very harsh time penalties in place. The race organiser proclaimed us "ambitious" which is the nicest was he could explain that we lost nearly half our points. I'm going to own 'ambitious'. Maybe a future team name?
Although we biked and ran for a truckload more points, the lack of timekeeping cost us most of them, just scraping in to beating the boys who bought us dinner.
Happy 15th anniversary Tom Hambrook. Normal people go out for dinner. I'm glad I married a man who agrees it's more fun to race against each other through trails, pines, Bush, streams, farms, cutty grass and swamps for six hours instead. Xx
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