You’ve got to love an event where you arrive at the arena to discover the following overnight occurrences:

• A circus has set up camp in the north west corner of the course. Warning: circus not mapped. Please run around it
• A control has been removed from the course due to “thermal activity”. Visions of pushing the stand into the ground and hitting a steaming geyser.  Oops! Beat hasty retreat and grab red pens to cross control off maps
• Cyclones Debbie and Cook have caused major flooding, and the shoreline of Lake Rotorua is nowhere near where it is mapped. Step off boardwalk into calf deep water in order to wade across the northern end of the adjacent golf course. Venice street race anyone?

Most of our group had starts between 9am and 9.30am.  My start was 11.50am.  So I had plenty of time to laze about in the sunshine, gaining intel on how wet people’s feet got.  By the time I started I was well prepared for whatever the course could throw at me.

The course was quite straightforward as the area was mostly parkland with very few buildings.  It was a runner’s course being so open, and didn’t have many changes of direction or navigational tricks.  Things stayed relatively dry for the first few controls, then we had a long leg across the top of the golf course, which involved diving off the boardwalk into murky waters, contents unknown. I negotiated that ok, then splashed my way round until I reached solid ground again. Shoes and socks soaked, but I was having fun in that weird sort of way you do.

The next few controls were very close to the lakeshore road, and it was easy enough just to pick them off, with my focus being on keeping running.  My only problem came between nos 12 and 13, when I couldn’t see a way out of the thick green surrounding 12. Eventually I popped out on the road again and backtracked to 13, wasting precious time.  The rest of the course was dead simple – too simple in fact, there were plenty of small ornamental lakes, statues and bridges which would have made a really nice finish, but we came more or less straight in.

I had one control right on the edge of the supposedly out of bounds bowling green, which was just silly, as I could see it from miles away.  They also used out of bounds tape to indicate direction, which was quite confusing, and they positioned the start triangle in a manner which invited competitors to ignore it and cut off quite a bit of distance at the beginning.  So a couple of organisational errors and a lost opportunity to make the most of the area, but otherwise good fun. I was never going to be at the pointy end of the results in such straightforward running terrain.

Afterwards, Prue and I went for a drive around Lake Rotorua, and a rainforest walk to see some beautiful waterfalls which were in full spate after the rain.  Photos below.  Oceania is now over, and we are heading back to Auckland to begin the World Masters phase the day after tomorrow.