Hindsight hurts
The big thing with rogaining is planning your route. How many checkpoints can you visit within 24 hours? Which checkpoints will give you most points? How do you collect the most points for the least distance travelled, and avoiding unnecessary climb? Which areas of the map are best avoided at night? Which area gives you the best run home with options to miss checkpoints if you’re short on time?
For the World Rogaining Champs, Robb and I planned an ambitious route and I was pretty happy with it during the race. We built in plenty of options for short-cutting if we were falling behind time; it took us around most of the high-value checkpoints, and we saved the vaguest area of the map for the morning because it looked to be a trap at night. We had plenty of options for getting home whilst still collecting points… like I said, I was happy.
Naturally, now that I look at it with plenty of time and no pressure (and knowledge of the terrain), I’m less satisfied with our route planning. I think we neglected the juiciest areas of checkpoints whilst covering a lot of ground out in the far corners of the map. I think we could have scored more in less time if we’d approached it differently.
Hindsight hurts. And it wasn’t even the biggest mistake we made…
