Well would you look at that? Less than a week since my last race report, I’m here writing about another impromptu race that I signed up for over the weekend. Well, ok, to be fair, I actually signed up for it on Wednesday this time, so not totally last second, but still, if you’d asked me a week earlier what my plans were for the weekend, I would have said ‘no plans’. The race in question this time? Challenge the Gats Rogaine. As a refresher, Rogaine stands for Rugged Outdoor GROUP Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance. In my case, essentially […]
rogaine
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Sometimes, the best races are the ones you hadn’t planned on, and basically had no specific expectations going into them. Such was the case with the recent victory my friend John Ranson and I experienced at a 3-hour orienteering race called “Challenge the Gats” happening close to home in Gatineau Park. Although we weren’t the overall winners (4 super speedy solo racers beat us), we were however 5th overall, and the 1st team to cross the line and clear the course. Read on for more on this sweet victory. For those uninitiated, an orienteering race, or rogaine, is deviously simple. […]
Greetings friends, and welcome to another exciting race report from the wilds of the Muskoka region! Yup, that’s right, once again, I made my way into the beautiful lands west of Ottawa and north of Toronto. This time, I was taking part in the RockstAR Adventure Race, an 8-hour rogaine-style adventure race (more on this later), with my friend and team-mate of years gone by, Carl. And for a change, I actually wasn’t covering this event for the magazine. I was bona-fide just there for some fun and a good hard race with no thought being given to capturing good footage to distil the entire event into a little video. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a camera with me, and to those ends, why not check out some of the pictures I took before reading the rest of the post? It was another fun-filled weekend, with great weather, and a pretty cool race experience. Find out all about it after the jump!
Nope, in this case my friends, rogaine is actually a backronym which stands for Rugged Outdoor Group Activity Involving Navigation and Endurance. Quite a mouthful, right? It is also named for the founders of this kind of event, ROd Phillips, GAIl Davis (née Phillips) and NEil Phillips (ROGAINE). Now you might be wondering what a Rogaine actually is, seeing as this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned it. In fact, it was also the first time I’ve ever taken part in one. Essentially, it is a sport purely consisting of orienteering (using a map and compass to find checkpoints). It is all done on foot, in teams, in this case a team of 2. You have a given amount of time in which to find as many controls as you can before the cutoff. Each control is worth a set number of points. The team with the highest score wins. Getting all CPs is usually very difficult, and if you cross the line after the cutoff, you lose serious points for every minute. In this sense, the sport is very much in line with what I love about AR, only it is all on foot, and is a matter of pure speed, and route tactics. Read on to learn all about my first experience, and how I did. Along with the customary pictures that I took, I invite you to also watch the video race review that I put together for Get Out There Magazine. Afterwards, read on for my story.