Upside Down with Ay Ups

Team Mountain Designs kicked off its 2013 season with an Upside Down Rogaine at a beautiful spot not far from Fernvale called England Creek. With Ay Up lights on board as a team sponsor this year it was a perfect event to start off with as we started at 11pm and finished at 7am, so yes…..most of the event was in darkness! 

Teams were given an opportunity to collect 37 checkpoints in the 8hr period, but in early planning we realised that this would mean over 50k on foot, so we opted to leave out a few. Teams were all together early on until the terrain became steeper and almost impenetrable lantana separated everyone. We found ourselves crawling through lantana tunnels and tramping through thick, prickly vegetation… making navigation rather challenging. We were however happy to find our way down to a nice little creek, which was clear …..so enjoyed a little rock hop for a while and we got really wet feet, but it cooled us off just nicely before the big trek up to CP 130  (the biggest point scorer of the event). It was a tough climb, but all on track so once we got to the top it a great run down the other side to find another CP in a creek.

We were well behind schedule, it was now over 4hrs and we would soon get to water, we filled up and soon lost the plot a bit…..taking a few incorrect creek lines before working out our error. We were well behind schedule, had dropped two planned CP’s and still had a long way to go…but somehow we just seemed to get faster and faster, well actually the terrain became much easier, and we had a ball running over highpoints and down long flowing spurs pretty much all the way back. We managed to fit in a hike to one more highpoint just minutes before 7am and enjoyed our little swim across the creek at the end.

We collected 30 out of 37 CP’s for a total of 1750 points. Somehow we ended up overall winners 170 points ahead of the nearest team of Robbie and Sloshy  (all male) who we raced with in this event last year, and 230 points ahead of the nearest mixed team (Liam, Leo, Ray, Bec).  So over 42k travelled – mostly off track and mostly in the dark…..we are certainly happy with Race 1 of the season!

Next Event – Kim races with Leo in Ridgeline Adventure’s – ‘The Kick Off’ – with Gary as Race Director…..it is sure to be a challenge!