Butterfly Creek Nighttime Madness

Several months ago Mark and I entered the Butterfly Creek Nighttime Madness cross-country race. It seemed like a good idea. At the race start after dark on a Saturday night in the middle of August, our sanity certainly seemed in question.

The race is done in pairs. For me, this basically meant that Mark was going to have a cruisy race while I was the one pushing myself to the limits. This wasn't helped by the fact I had a cold. I was tempted to pull out but the lack of girls willing to take my place (why is that?) meant I decided just to man up.

The race was 9.75 km and 400 m climb. It started in Eastbourne, winding along through a little native bush track over the ridge, down the creek, over the ridge again and back along the waterfront.

We did really well with a placing of 8th in a time of 1:19:15. I think this was (mainly?) due to our awesome gear. We had our Inov8 'Mudclaws' and my super-duper bright Silva headtorch that my lovely parents bought me for my birthday. With traction and illumination we were able to steam past everyone else slithering into unseen tree roots. I expect they were also intimidated by my impressively loud wheezing.

Don't mess with the mud claws

There was a cut-off point about 4 km from the end that if you didn't make it an hour you'd have to go back the short way. It is a little annoying that this isn't represented in the results, so potentially some of the people above us and lots of the people after us did a much shorter race. Perhaps something they could fix next time!