rogaine at lakenvlei

Last weekend I flew up to Johannesburg, and joined my sister, Nadine, and her family, for the drive out to Lakenvlei forest, just outside Belfast, for the two day Rogaine event.

On saturday we had six hours to collect as many controls as we can on foot. It was raining the whole day, my favourite weather, and the forests were really nice. Awesome views, fairly easy navigation, no huge hills. The perfect way to spend a day, running around in a forest. We also saw lots of commercial mushroom pickers out there in the rain.

Since neither Dorian, my racing partner for the event, or I are super top fit runners, we decided to take safe routes, going for the bigger points on the northern part of the map, leaving lots of options on the way back in case we had spare time, but still being able to shortcut the route if we need to hurry back within the six hours to prevent penalties.

We covered around 30km in the six hours, going in a anti-clockwise pattern. Our route is drawn below.



Then on sunday, it was a five hour cycle. I've only been back on my bicycle for about a month now, that combined with the stiffness from the previous day, and some sunny and hot weather, made the going very hard for me from about two hours into the race. Dorian is a much stronger cyclist than I am, so I slowed us down quite a bit. But we had a very pleasant day out there. Some more beautiful valleys and views.

We covered around 50km in the five hours, again heading for the northern part of the map, but clockwise this time, except for the small section in the way north, which we did anti-clockwise.



Overall, a very good weekend, my legs were very tired and sore, but I was almost fully recovered within 3 days. And it was very nice spending a few days with Nadine and her kids.