Pressing my luck--two days of orienteering

On March 5th and 6th, I participated in a rogaine event with my friend, Frank Boscoe. Rogaining is orienteering, but done with a partner. We had eight hours each day to find as many controls as possible and the route and order was our choice. These controls are scattered over a wide area and involve traveling on anything from paved roads, dirt roads, marked trails, game trails, or just plain bushwhacking, in order to reach them.

Since I'm still in recovery mode from my arthroscopic knee surgery, I had agreed to join Frank, but only if we could walk the entire time. In previous rogaines, we would have run and been able to cover much longer distances than we would if just walking.

Day 1 went fairly well navigationally, and route choice wise, and I ended up covering 22.30 miles, much better than I had anticipated.

The event was based at Endless Trail, a horse farm in Hubbardsville, New York, that offers B&B service to riders. It was a beautiful location and the start and finish, along with our room, was at the farm. So, we got to eating and replenishing right away after day 1.

The next day, due to distribution of the controls, we knew that we could reach only certain controls within the eight hours and that we'd have more roads to traverse than day 1. And we had that right--I covered 24.2 miles. Surprisingly, despite barely being able to walk upstairs on my way to the bedroom the night before, I felt pretty energetic the whole eight hours. As I team, we placed third in our age group, about what we thought possible.

My knee, however, wasn't too happy with those two days--it swelled a fair bit and was sore for at least three days after the event. 

So, I may have done too much, too soon, but I do not feel that I did any further damage to the knee. It just needed to rest and recover. Certainly I have zilch plans to do 20-mile days when I start hiking the AT.