Auckland Secondary Schools Rogaine Championship

Rogaine is a challenging orienteering competition where athletes are given multiple navigation points and tasked with reaching as many as possible in a time frame. Steep penalties are given if they arrive back late, and the points are normally located in challenging terrain or the top of ridgelines or low points so lots of hill running was involved.

The team did remarkably well, especially facing a very strong and large combined group from Whangarei Boys’ and Whangarei Girls’ High schools, who had two national champions and having most of the winning Hillary Challenge team on the field in this event. Despite this our team dug deep and gave some very determined performances in the 90 minute race.

Noticeable performances were Gemma Black (Upham House) and Esme Du Plessis (Hillary) who placed third out of sixteen teams behind two very experienced and fit teams. There was only twenty points between third and first, which was the average score of one checkpoint. Also Cole Brown (Snell) and Jonathan Li (Snell) placed fourth out of thirty teams in a gruelling intermediate boy’s competition.

This is a remarkable result from the Macleans Orienteering team being that they are only in development and this is the first year that they have been seriously competing in adventure racing, outside of more traditional orienteering. Further training and the development of a junior and senior eight man teams will see these results replicated and hopefully improved on next year and into the future.