"Course Notes" - May 2008
Greetings again everyone! The first thing I would like to do in this edition of the President’s Piece is to thank Trevor Gollan, Phil Whitten and their crew for a smoothly run NSW Championships event on a great course down at Bendalong on the south coast recently. I personally enjoyed the event a great deal (well, except for when I was hammering my way through shrubbery). There was fabulous coastline and some great ferny gullies, although the extensive track network meant we had to keep running, which is cruel… Their course really spread people out in terms of both directions travelled and points scored – with Dave Baldwin and Julie Quinn from the ACT managing to clear the course (the swines) with 30 minutes to spare. There were a few creepy-crawlies out there on the course, but only one NSWRA Committee member has so far reported having to remove a leech from their private parts, so that’s not too bad, I reckon!
The next event coming up in the general vicinity is the ACT 8/24-h Champs on 17-18 May, and hopefully we will see a good number of NSW rogainers there flying the flag. After all, if those ACT people are going to come in and pinch our trophies, it seems only fair that we reciprocate. The event is being held east of Canberra, at Tallaganda, and it sounds like it will be an event with some tricky navigation and plenty of cross-country legs to be done.
After that, attention will turn to what has become the largest event on the Australian rogaining calendar – the NSW Paddy Pallin event – which promises to live up to the high standards that have been set in the past. Hopefully, we won’t be flooded out of half of the course this year, and we can push those fast boys (and girls) for the full six hours! Make sure you get your entry in for the event (Sunday 15 June) and polish up that compass. If you can help out at all on the day for this event, Ian Almond would love to hear from you (ian.almond@tpg.com.au) – the size of the event means we need more volunteers than usual. Maybe your other half who isn’t competing in the event might be prepared to come up and lend a hand?
The next item on the agenda is to remind everyone that if you have any ideas for events – great places to hold them, different formats, or otherwise – please get in contact with us – we would love to hear from you! You can talk to us at events or drop us a line through the email link on the web page. The ACT and Victorian people have had a number of cycle-gaine and canoe-gaine events, so maybe we can think a bit more about options for slightly different events (skateboard-gaine?). We would love it even more if you were willing to organize the event too, but we are still just happy to get ideas, comments and feedback. The email address to use is president@nswrogaining.org.
If you have some spare time on your hands and your web browser open (and you are tired of reading the same old articles about Tom and Katy in the SMH online), you could pop over to the International Rogaining Federation’s web site (www.rogaining.com) – a random browse through their newsletters (…/newsletters/) provides some distraction. For example, where else can you learn that Estonia probably has the highest number of rogainers per capita? An interesting point in this regard is that the membership of NSWRA has been reasonably constant for at least the last 10 years – hovering around the 1000-1200 mark (which you discover by browsing one of the 1996 newsletters!). Given the recent rise of adventure racing as a sport, I hope that we will see some crossover of people into rogaining who have tried adventure races (coming from a different background) and now start to think “Gee – I wouldn’t mind being the one that navigates in the adventure race – how can I get some practice…?”. If nothing else, rogaines are competitively priced compared to adventure races, because they are volunteer-driven. Did I say volunteer? That reminds me…
The other thing that you learn from the IRF’s web site is some of the timings of other events around the world – if you happen to be travelling to Europe this summer for example, you can choose from 24-h events in Ireland (their first 24-h event ever!), Switzerland (ditto), Czech/Germany, Latvia, Finland, Sweden and Russia. How about that for variety?
Finally, if you haven’t already signed up for the NSWRA email list, I strongly urge you to do so – this is and will continue to be our main method of communicating with members, together with the web site.
Happy rogaining – hope to see you out there on a course soon!
Joel MacKay
President – NSW Rogaining Association