Hit or Miss Metrogaine Rogaining Tasmania
SAVE THE DATE: NORTH BRUNY 6 or 12 hour, 27 FEB 2021
Planning and course setting is well under way for our next bush event, on North Bruny Island, and we are delighted with the area. Most of the course is on Murrayfield Station which is a complex blend of sheep paddocks and lovely open forest. A highlight is the rarely-accessible east coast of Bruny, where rolling pasture drops abruptly into Storm Bay, but the course also extends to the west coast and the waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. The hash house is at Murrayfield homestead, near the red shearing shed in the photo. Put it in your diary!
2020 Vision Metrogaine Setter's Report
A lot of work - and a lot of fun - goes in to putting on a rogaine. This was my second time setting an event using the same map extent, and despite living on the map, and having lived (and run) in the Kingston area the majority of my life, I still learnt things and discovered places I’d never been to before. Having three of us – Gary, Ciara and I – to share the setting and vetting made the load very manageable.
This event was a bit longer in the planning than it might otherwise have been, thanks to Covid, but having an earlier-changed-to-later event date meant I had more time to procrastinate… ahem, I mean to carefully split my setting and vetting into lots of small trips. This was convenient for me living on the map – I could go out on a state-sanctioned Covid exercise excursion and set a checkpoint or two, and then pop out before dinner and vet a nearby checkpoint some weeks later.
Our team of three approached the setting task by dividing the map up into sections, with each of us responsible for setting within our allocated areas. This was my first time using Avenza Maps (a smartphone mapping app) for setting, which was a really convenient and satisfying way of doing it (although Gary was the one collating all the information exported from Avenza and doing all the mapping, so I know that was also a large part of what made it easy for me – thanks Gary!)
2020 Vision Metrogaine Race Report
By Jon McComb
Pulling up to the skate park in Blackmans Bay, we were greeted by a beautiful morning – perfect weather for rogaining around Kingborough’s beachside suburbs. My lovely wife and previous rogaine partner said I had to find someone else for this one as she was washing her hair. So I was fortunate to end up with Ian, whose regular partner was busted and seemed pretty happy to rein in his pace to match mine. In fact he was so blasé about the prospect of running 4 hours with me he went for a kayak in the morning.
I was looking forward to a solid run and breaking out of my usual running routes around the neighbourhood. With years of local running I figured we could cover about 40km depending on how hilly we made it. I think route planning before the start is a really fun but underappreciated part of rogaining. The fancy cardboard, pin and string set-ups used by a few experienced teams at the last rogaine caught my eye, so I brought all the bits along. What I discovered is that it takes next level coordination to manage everything in a breeze. As we plotted our route we reached the end of the string and still hadn’t covered all the controls… this was not a good sign. Our route to collect the lot would have been about 48km so unless we grew wings, we were going to have to drop some controls.
2020 Vision Metrogaine Results
Congratulations to 2020 Vision overall winners Jon McComb and Ian Parker. They travelled 41kms with 1000m of climb, visiting 47 of the 59 checkpoints available in (very slightly over) 4 hours. Simon Allen and Karen Wild-Allen were first mixed. Janet and Sue Hancock came first womens.
All the results are at https://rt.asn.au/event-results
If you were carrying a GPS, you can add your route to RouteGadget, or just have a look to see where other teams went. Instructions are at https://rt.asn.au/events/routegadget
Take a look at the photos taken at the event by Adele Winslow.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic
There is a great deal of uncertainty as to what the future may hold, although it is very likely that the rate of infection will escalate as will restrictions imposed by authorities.
Running a rogaine, whether metropolitan or in the countryside, creates difficult health and logistical challenges. Holding an event during the outbreak is likely to attract drastically fewer entrants, but more importantly it would be socially irresponsible. We must do our part to slow the spread of the virus.
Rogaining Tasmania has little choice but to join the chorus of other organisations who will not be holding events for the foreseeable future. Events will resume as soon as practical after the restrictions and risks have passed.
Gary Carroll (RT President)
23 March 2020.