The 4th annual Piha Rogaine is shaping up to be a goodie!

runningbeast Posted: 8 June 2005, 9:22 AM   The 4th annual Piha Rogaine is shaping up to be a goodie! The Shoe Science Piha Rogaine is this Saturday 11th June 2005 and could be the largest rogaine held in New Zealand, with 301 competitors so far (late entries are accepted up until 10am on Saturday) making up 108 teams. A look at past results puts this as the biggest rogaine in NZ apart from the World Rogaine Champs, held down in the Christchurch area in 2000, which had 415 people. A rogaine involves teams of 2-5 people navigating to a series of checkpoints in a set amount of time (either 3 or 6 hours). The checkpoints are allocated different points and the winner is the person with the most points who finishes in the allocated time. Penalty points are taken off your total score for arriving back to the event center after the allocated time. Competitors get an hour planning time before they start to try and plan the route that collects the most points in the allowed time. Piha is on the west coast of Auckland in the bush-clad Waitakere Ranges. The Piha area offers great terrain for a rogaine. With vast networks of walking tracks (ranging from nice wide tracks to very indistinct trails) and plenty of hills – using the planning time to plan a good route is crucial. Just over a third of the field are doing the 6-hour event. The favourites would have to be the orienteering combo of Brent Edwards and Neil Kerrison (Auckland). Both Edwards and Kerrison are in the New Zealand Orienteering team going to the World Champs in Japan during August (as a side line, the World Champs team have put themselves up for sale on TradeMe as a way of fundraising – go to TradeMe and search for “orienteering”). Probably stronger on their legs but not as strong in navigation is another male duo of Wayne Oxenham and Stuart Lynch (Auckland). These two are members of the “Team Subaru” adventure racing team, who have won the last three 24 hour adventure races they have entered. Contenders for the last podium spot include the mixed team of Wayne Hodgets/Sonia Clark and super veterans Mark Struthers/Henry Beex. In the 3-hour event it will be very interesting. The all women team of Tania Robinson and Rachel Smith are also orienteers in the World Orienteering Champs team and have been in this team for years. Navigational wise they will be hard to beat. But also in contention for line honours are the two-man team of Greg Flynn and Martin Peat who are orienteers on the verge of making the World Champs team, and the mixed veteran team of Jim Davidson and Penny Webster who won the three hour event at Piha in 2003. Behind the podium chasers there is a mix of teams – including a family team taking a 1 year old in a backpack on the 6-hour course, some corporate teams (Cadbury have 4 teams) and six teams of super veterans (over 50 years). One encouraging point for rogaine is the number of people doing a Lactic Turkey rogaine for the first time – over 50%. At the navigation coaching session that event directors Shaun Collins and Phil Wood organised on the Tuesday before this event, 25 people turned up to learn more about rogaine. The majority of these people had never done a rogaine before. For more details refer www.lacticturkey.co.nz