Well TWALK was fun, though more of a proper orienteering event than what I was expecting. It’s been running for around about 38 years, which is quite a while really. The event started at 9am, Thor picked me up at 8:30 and we headed to the college car park where we met the couple of hundred other people..
everyone is supposed – or at least is encouraged, to dress up.
This team – ‘The Supergrans’, dressed up well!, and actually won the prize for best dressed! Last year, the team that won dressed up as potatoes, and hiked all the 14km first leg carrying a couch. Needless to say, that team won that year for sheer effort!
So yup, the idea of TWALK is that it’s a sort of 24 hour orienteering event, but not a score event – there is a course, each of the checkpoints has a clue to help you find it – for example ‘New Zealand Salad’, was a clue to a Cabbage Tree… And, ‘A Backwards Tenor Ant?’.. Tell you at the end if you can’t work it out.
Once the first leg was over (20km ish) you get to the central base, there there’s food and drink all night, which is nice. We did the first leg in around about 6 hours, pretty average, and then at about 7:30 headed out on the second leg, and did a further 23km ish. So all in all I hiked a marathon. Though by the end of it I was completely wrecked, just completely. Feet were, and are, surprisingly fine, had one small blister, but it’s grand.
There were quite a few people there, this is about 1/4 of the tents.
The winning team completed all 5 legs in 21 hours. That was over 100 km. That’s a heluva long way! Running I imagine pretty much all of it. Quite funny, at one point they were getting trailed by another team, so they just turned off their torches and ran!! :)
So yes, got back in at 4am, and slept until we left at 11am. Our team did win a prize though. Our team name: Something Witty as we were taking the Mick out of team names… an entire bag of chocolate sweets!
lazy Sunday, and today – Monday – back to work, got out of my squash match, and then had a few games of pool, and then dinner with Glynn. Which was just great fun.
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