The idea in a rogaine is that you take this map, and a compass and a watch if you want, and you make your way to as many of these control points as you can in the time given, generally twelve or twenty four hours. You are allowed to return to the start for food or sleep at any time if you want. You go out with a partner for safety, and you must never be more than about 100 metres from them. Each control that you make you sign on at, and they're worth varying amounts of points depending on how far away they are and how difficult to find they are. The point total you come back with is used to determine winners and top teams if you care about that sort of thing - it's a way of setting goals and choosing one route over another. Typically the winners are older, like 35 plus or even 50 plus, which surprises a lot of people. My mother thinks it's because older people are inclined to be cunning and lazy in their planning, which will always beat youthful enthusiasm, didn't someone say?
Anyway. At the start of every season (usually March) there is a six-hour rogaine, usually held in the metropolitan area. It's a chance to warm up your skills, introduce new people etc. It's nice in that you're always close to delicatessens and public toilets and such like so it can be quite a pleasant little jaunt. This year they decided to hold the six-hour in the bush for the first time. I and my beloved were talked into going along by my mother, who has rogained in over half of the rogaines held in this state. So we went to Keaney College north of Gingin, where the start point (and all of the map, it turned out) was located. Keaney College is a Catholic agricultural highschool, so the land was relatively open, paddocks and such like.
My beloved and I always go barefoot. I'd warned him that he might want shoes, after my experiences orienteering in terrain only subtly different from that chosen for rogaines. We agreed to take shoes for the after dark section of the rogaine, knowing it might be difficult to tread well and safely. As my feet can get quite tired after a few hours, I also took thongs. The idea behind these is that if you find yourself in the middle of a prickle patch, you can put them on for long enough to get out of it! And, as I've explained to overseas barefooters before, the local bush presents some unique hazards.
We have plants such as the dryandra and hakea families, or banksias or grevilleas - many varied and stunningly beautiful wildflowers. Their common characteristic, exemplified by a species called "parrot bush", is very stiff prickly and spiky leaves. Parrot bush likes to break off just a little bit in your foot, in eight places at once per leaf, and you never get hit by only one leaf. As a plant it grows in tall stems spaced at roughly 10-20 centimetres, forming large thickets up to six foot tall. It's not a popular plant with anyone who walks off the beaten track, and many who try and stay on it too. Other plants have different styles, but all have evolved in a climate with harsh bright hot light for most of the year and only minimal water. This means they protect the water they manage to get by making stiff, waxy, prickly, spiky, thorny, tiny wrinkled leaves and flowers that have minimal or even no petals at all. You don't go jumping into bushes to play hide and seek without looking very carefully for a safe bush. It's not uncommon for orienteers to return from a run with their trousers slashed into strips below the knees from the undergrowth, which is why many people wear gators.
But apart from the hazards of the flora, our bush is wonderful to spend time in, and I can't think of a better way than a rogaine in many ways. It's a mental challenge as well as a physical, and for some people an emotional challenge too - can you really stay out during the night without succumbing to our usual urban terror of the black wilderness? Can you work as part of a team for an extended period of time in an adrenalin-filled situation? I've heard all this before, and this was the first time my love and I did it.
We went out when the start horn blew, and immediately discovered about two thirds of the other 250 people were going the same way. So we held off a bit near the first control, and changed our plans a little so that we weren't following anyone. It was a beautiful walk, through sheep paddocks, crushed wheat stems and dry sheep poo all over the ground, with the occasional pile of bones and a few flies. Not too many though. We had to climb a few fences, rusty wire and clean wire, old wooden posts and tougher new ones. After a few controls we hit an airstrip, which had really sharp gravel towards one end. About here my thongs came out for the first time. It'd been about two hours walk by that point, and I wanted to keep my feet not overly sensitised for the rest of it. Sharp gravel always wakes up my feet. So I did one control leg across a paddock in thongs, then took them off again when we hit the watercourses. This was an area that looked like erosion was causing it problems. Deep clay fissures in the ground, quite pleasant to the feel. We hit bush for the first time just after going around them. The bush wasn't bad, actually - I led, it was complicated finding a way through it but we persevered. The only annoyance was the ants - big mounds of medium sized ants which were hard not to step on - they were the only clear patches of ground!
We found another control, and chatted to a couple of people about being barefoot - they were quite astonished. Couldn't stand still though as the ants would eat you alive if you did, so we headed off downhill to a road that should have been there. About half way I had to put on my thongs. The ants had changed to tiny little fastmoving buggers that bite quick, thousands of them. To avoid the worst of it you had to move so fast you couldn't put your feet down carefully. The thongs helped me get through that, though I stumbled more on the groundcover and uneven surfaces than I had before. You really appreciate the balance bare feet give when you're running without them! My love put on his shoes half way as well.
When we reached the road there was a water drop, so we drank and took stock. We'd each sustained several splinters and we took the worst of these out, and I had a couple of cuts on the top of my foot that I got losing my balance in the thongs. A team were there that we'd seen before and they commented that this might be history - a team barefoot/thonged. Another lady thought there might have been a team of kids that went thonged once having forgotten their shoes, but none deliberately. We went off again, sans shoes and smiling.
At the next control we knew darkness would hit us soon, so my beloved took advantage of clean and pleasant ground to put on his shoes. I thought that was exactly the reason I should stay barefoot, so didn't put mine on until the sun was definitely gone and the sky was flaming. It was a lovely sunset over the paddocks, something Tom Roberts or maybe even Arthur Streeton might have appreciated. The bush sections were pretty still, cycads and gently spaced saplings creating a soft and airy look as the day faded. I didn't enjoy having to put my boots on, even though they were my favourites back in the days when I wore shoes at all. My soles were quite dirty at this point, but not really very much so for several hours walk.
The rest of the rogaine seemed to pass quickly. Sunset was at quarter to seven or so and moonrise wasn't until about an hour later so there was a good half hour of complete darkness before the almost-full moon hit us. Around this point we got lost, having misjudged how far we'd gone (and we were in the thickest part of bush on the course at the time), and after stumbling around a while gave up and headed in the direction of our way out, only to walk straight into the control. We knew though that we didn't have a lot of time left. Every minute you are late you lose points, so you never want to be late - and we don't use watches. So we went on our time sense and moonrise to tell us that we were going to have to start running or at least keep moving fast if we wanted to get back to the starting point some kilometres away in the hour left.
It was a bit of a race, and my feet hurt from the shoes, but we made it with nine minutes to spare. It's a thrilling sight - for the last couple of hours you've seen no-one - maybe one or two teams at some distance from you - and then suddenly you're somewhere where you can look out over the landscape and see tens of torches starting to move, to converge in the direction of the finish line. As you get closer people begin to run, and it seems like a flight of what I suppose fireflies look like, or maybe fairie lights, disembodied, all heights and speeds and directions, flying towards you. At five minutes to the finish time a horn blows as a warning. We were home safe by then, much to our surprise.
The first thing I did was take my shoes off! There'd been what felt like a blister forming on each foot in the last few kilometres, and I was fairly sure that the one on my right foot had popped in the dash for the finish. Sure enough, it had - and I gratefully went back to being barefoot. My soles were much blacker than they had been - so much for shoes keeping your feet clean! We placed well for a novice team, about half-way. There were only ever a few comments, either joking or admiring or curious, never any negatives. There don't need to be in a sport like that - a fellow competitor did check to see if we had shoes with us and knew what we were getting into before we left, but only in the most genial way. He wasn't concerned about us being barefoot as much as just making sure we knew the bush rules. So overall it was a great time. We walked about sixteen kilometres in the six hours, I did about six and a half shod, the same barefoot and the rest in thongs. My beloved did about half of the walk barefoot and the rest shod. We may have set a first!
Addendum: my beloved caught the rogaining bug and went out again on the first "real" rogaine - a twelve hour, with my mother. Again a range of positive comments, including one lady who told them afterwards that they knew they'd been following my mother and beloved because they'd seen a barefootprint in the soft dirt. And my feet finally healed from the shoes, though it took over ten days to get better.