Rogaining World Championships 2013

 

Serge and Maria finished 10th in Mixed category

 

One more report from overall winners from Estonia is here>>

Event map in big resolution is here>>

(photos are from wrc2013.com)

We went to our homeland, Russia, this year for a month in July, not only to visit our families and see friends, but we also kept in mind World Rogaining Championships hosted this year in Pskov region. This area is known to be an orienteering mecca for ages, having pretty much ’Scandinavian’ – style landscape. I think it was one of the hardest terrains to navigate through, with numerous 5 to 15 meter depressions randomly distributes through the forest without any  system except ridgelines and depressions direction; multiple marshes, bogs and impassable water bodies.  
Expectations of a map and the distance were set very high, orienteering mecca having multiple orienteering quality maps, complex terrain and best orienteers to set/vet course  and place checkpoints, this is definitely a key success for a distance. Expectations of our fitness and readiness were not as high though, Maria went through pretty nasty crashes in China earlier this year and did not do much running to let her knee get healed; also after Australian Rogaining Championships, I did not train much as well.  
The navigation readiness was not as high as well, I think main issue for us as a team, is inability to decide which CP is not worth going there, we always trying to get a many of them around us as possible, and then we don’t have time for richer areas. We came to the race camp one of the first and had a favor to grab one of the best spots for our tents. We had two or three days before the event, so we spent them relaxed and enjoying camping life.   2
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People started to come and set their tents around, we met also quite a representative Aussie rogainers team, which we were a part of (yes we did it as Assies, not Russians). To my surprise we also met Rob Gardiner and Peter in near the map polygon area. We made a two hour walk through the model map, trying to keep off track, but blueberries and cranberries were our main distraction factor to keep us off from thinking and navigating well. Even in this little 8km loop we did a few mistakes, also map style and terrain was something new to us. We nearly missed the start packing our food and water. It was a great scene to see 700+ people running through the field in 7 different directions.   
Our plan worked our quite good, experience from Austrlian Champs was  good baggage here. We were going approximately at our forecasted speed, running at about 9k/hour on the road and moving 3k/hr in the bush. There were a few tricky places during first 5-6 hours of the race, but we did negotiate orienteering and navigation well and did not do any substantial mistakes. Night time gave us a bit of a relief from horse flies and heat, which we did not get used to coming from Melbourne winter straight into it. Horse flies and mosquitoes were very annoying, and we did not think about them from the start and did not pack any repellents with us.
This was probably our biggest strategic mistake for the race.  We run out of the water once, far off bigger water bodies and water drops, so we had to use purification tabs and unclean water from closest marsh, but it seem to digest well and did not cause any issues to us in the future. Navigation got harder without light, but the good thing was we already got a few tracks going towards CPs. The problem was to choose a right one. There was one place where we spent 5 minutes trying to figure out where we are at, but we successfully found ourselves in the next depression to the CP one.   6
Night water swim was quite easy, water level were not as high as they were at the time map was drawn apparently, and we crossed ‘impassable’ waterbody in waist-high water. Morning found us a bit behind planned schedule, and we had to cut two or three CP’s with high points but seemingly having long taking time. We had one more small navigation mishap, when we took a wrong ‘mammoth trail’ that led us around CP. We probably lost 5 minutes there, and even though I knew we are going a bit wrong way, at the moment I realized that there was too late to go back.   
We were closing to finish, more and more teams were running along the track we were on. When we came to finish, we still had 25 minutes left, and managed to do return run to another close CP to complete our collection. Overall I think it was great experience to race this rogaine, we came 10th in mixed, quite far behind the winners, but I still think it was quite close to our best effort. Even though we both were not at the top shape, we probably lost most of our point not because of our speed but some tactical route choice. This was mostly because of new terrain and map style to us. Happy to finish top ten in the world, and get another great race under the belt