Recently my friends and I, Sophia,Olivia and Bree, participated in the Kaikoura Adventure race representing Marlborough Girls' College!

We were all a little nervous going into this as three of the girls had never done any kind of biking or map reading before so going into it was going to be a big challenge. There were a lot of ups and downs, mainly on the first rogaine. We started off on a little less than 5km bike to the start of the rogaine; the start was very cramped, there was a gate everyone had to get out of at the start and over 80 people on the start line. When the starting gun went off, we tried to get out of the gate as quickly as we could……losing a few team members in the making! We all found each other again and then came across a sty we all had to lift our bikes over. This was as crowded as the gate! Then we stopped our bikes and started on the Rogaine. This was the hardest section on the course. There were 15 checkpoints and we had to collect eight to pass the course. The overall course was around 16km for all eight checkpoints. With a few navigation muck ups, we ended up taking a lot longer than we thought and had to go back for a few checkpoints to complete the eight checkpoints we needed. Everybody was pretty exhausted by this point. Some sentences came across a few of our minds …. “Oh we aren't going to finish this”, ''We have been on the rogaine for way too long”, “'maybe we should pull out'', but as Bree always said..…..”positive thoughts girls!” Olivia said many times “I didn't come all this way to pull out now. Let's go!”

FINALLY!! We finished the rogaine and hopped on our bikes. The bike section was super easy. We rode along a nice smooth track along the river then onto a tarseal road. We had to collect all three check points on this course to get into the next transition. We ended up riding along some old farm four wheel drive tracks. We were almost at the next transition but leading up to it had a steep gravel road. Liv and I were excited! We were racing to that transition leaving the other girls somewhere down the road. We could hear them yelling for a little break, but knowing the transition was less than 200 metres away, I was really mean and yelled “hurry up… almost there!”

We arrived at our next transition where our support crew was waiting for us. They changed our socks, fueled us up with food and drinks and we felt so much better! We were excited to smash this next rogaine as it was a lot easier than the first. For this rogaine you could get any amount of points you wanted. We came into transition at about 3:30pm. We wanted to be back at the transition before it got too dark so we had an hour and a half to find a few checkpoints. We ran to our first two check points then followed the map up the hill to the next. We only collected four in this rogaine. We were hoping for seven but didn't have enough time. We had to be at the finish at 6 o'clock otherwise points would have been deducted from our team.

We came running into transition, hopped on our bikes and made a mad dash down the big hill and flew through the next mountain bike section. Most of it was downhill, back to the Kaikoura township with the finish line at Kaikoura High School. We raced off our bikes and ran off onto a really small 16 point orienteering section around the high school. The difference between a rogaine and orienteering is that when you are doing a rogaine, you can do it in any order. When you are orienteering, you have to do it in the order your map says. We sprinted around the course just wanting to be finished at this point. We had been going all day and it was almost 6pm at night .We finally saw the finish line and sprinted and sprinted till we hit the last checkpoint on the flag pole!

We were finished! We crossed the line with five mins to spare. Some of the girls yelled “I'm never doing that again! Thanks for the experience but not happening again”. We all started laughing. It took us a little longer than six hours but that's ok; for a few of the girls it was their first time, and we managed to sneak into third position for the South Island Secondary schools category!

With a few black toes, cuts and grazes, we still managed to have smiles on our face for the rest of the night!

Neve McKenzie
Year 9