ive just realised that yr off to navigate thorugh prime matagouri country
Prophetic words from my wonderful friend Aroha. She was half right – it was matagouri (think gorse but with longer spikes) country.. but I left the navigation up to Clare as I wanted to get round the course within the time limit – rather than 3 weeks late. Great to see Graham&Myra along too :)
So the Mountain Marathon started off as a UK event – but basically it’s just an orienteering event set in the hills (carrying all your gear). I was woken up at 3am ish by hailstones battering down on my roof, and I pulled my duvet a little closer and wished 06:30 would just pass me by.
It didn’t. Thankfully. I suppose ;) So off to the square where we met everyone and got our funky tags for the event…
These are quite sneaky things really.. the checkpoints have a weird pen like device (no pic sorry) that you hold your magnety thing up to .. it then encodes onto it that you’ve passed that point.. so at the end of the race you can immediately see how many points you’ve got – how quick you were etc..
Anyway.. it was a pretty long day on the Sat. Must scan in the map sometime. No team (and there were some fit ones) finished on time. We were an hour and a half over time.. which wasn’t too bad really – and actually put us in second place (out of 10)..
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We did at least have lovely clear skies. Mind you, clear skies at night tend to lead to cold too. In fact my shoes were *kinda* frozen in the morning.. The billy didn’t really work that well..
Clare’s feet were a little smaller than mine and she kindly put hers in and warmed them up to the point I could get mine in (still cold though!). Warmed up pretty quickly once we got moving though :)
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Sunday was a lot shorter.. and hardly anyone did the optional extra checkpoints… Everyone was pretty much knackered after Saturdays effort.
So yes, good fun all told. There are a few more events coming up TWALK which I will probably miss this year – and another called the Heights of Winter.. which I will try to get on.
And now – a reward for reading this far… Some Donald Rumsfeld quotes on the
BBC Site. Well well worth a listen to :)
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