Lactic Turkey Rogaine Series: Orakei Rogaine

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In : New Zealand Running Calendar

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The inaugural Orakei Rogaine by Lactic Turkey Events was on Sunday August 24th 2014, based at the Orakei Sea Scouts Hall at Orakei Basin. Chris Hope, aka Mr Running Calendar, is a Cub Leader at Orakei Sea Scouts and was there on the day to help out with the kayaking activity and then subsequently ran it himself the following Thursday.

Photos on this page thanks to and copyright Shaun Collins.

What is a rogaine?

A rogaine is a team navigational challenge where teams try to score as many points within a time limit by navigating to checkpoints using a provided map. Sometimes they're urban, sometimes they're in the bush, and sometimes they're a combination of the two.

Shaun Collins' Lactic Turkey Rogaine series has 90 minute and 3 hour rogaines which combine checkpoints with fun mystery activities worth lots of points! This makes it a great family activity as you can accumulate a lot of points without having to run too far.

The Orakei Rogaine

The weather couldn't have been better for the event: it was sunny with no wind. There were over 30 teams competing across the two events, and included several very competitive secondary school teams.

The challenges at this rogaine were all worth 200 points* so well worth doing: kayaking, wall/rock climbing, puzzle solving and shooting basketball hoops (20 points per hoop with 10 shots).

* Checkpoints at the rogaine are worth 20 to 100 points, usually depending how far away they are and/or how difficult they are to get to or find. Some of the challenges would only take a few minutes so if you're going to do a Lactic Turkey Rogaine, make sure you do the challenges for some easy points.

There were a few teams who only did some of them (or none at all) that would probably have finished in the top 3 overall if they'd done more challenges. We found this out ourselves when we did the Meadowbank Rogaine as a family a couple of years back, and concentrated more on checkpoints than challenges.

One of the nice things about a rogaine is that all the teams finish at the same time, and Lactic Turkey puts on a finish line BBQ so you can grab a bite to eat and catch up with the other teams afterwards while waiting for the results to be collated. And LT always has plenty of great spot prizes!

It was a great day for all participating, and I enjoyed myself on the other sidr as a volunteer for a change.

But I had to do it myself!

Because I'd seen how much everyone had enjoyed the event themselves, I decided that I was going to have to do it too. I got a map and the questions from Shaun, and gave myself 15 minutes before starting on Thursday morning to plot out my route and work out where to go.

I know the area really well (I live nearby and run around here a lot) but other than that didn't have any special insider knowledge of where anything was, and hadn't looked at the map in any detail previously: I was out to race it and attempt to score more points than anyone else and needed to do it fairly.

Although it was just me running, I still enjoyed it and it made it quite different from a normal training run, navigating around the place and looking for checkpoints, sometimes hidden quite well.

In the end I scored 2160 points for the 3 hour rogaine, including 500 from the activities I could do, which would have ranked me 5th overall, and 2nd out of the two other solo racers. I lost 300 points from getting some of the checkpoint questions wrong; some of the questions were a little subjective and I suspect I would have been scored more leniently by the LT team, which would have improved my placing :)

What's up next?

This was the first of three events in this year's series. The other two are at Laingholm School on September 27th as a fundraiser for Zara Collins to go to Japan, and in Karekare on November 1st as a fundraiser for the Lone Kauri Community School.

I'll be running at Laingholm with my family: my wife Jane, 9 year old Jamie and just about to start school Sam. I suspect Sam will end up being piggy backed a bit and we'll concentrate on the activities more than the checkpoints, but it'll be a great day out. See you there!

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