By Brooke Carpenter, 10 May 2025
On a blustery Wellington evening, a motley crew of VUWTCers gathered at Wellington Airport armed with fluffy pillowcases, headbands, and copious amounts of electrolytes, lollies, and caffeine pills. We were off to compete in TWALK, a 24 hour rogaine run by CUTC.
A quick rogaining explanation for those yet to be indoctrinated into the cult: during a leg, you’ve got a time limit, and a map with lots of controls marked. It’s up to you how many controls you go to - but more controls = more points. TWALK gives you 24 hours to complete 5 legs, and uses the wonderfully robust and easily spottable white paper plates as controls (sarcasm very much intended).
After one lost puffer jacket and an extremely racist bus driver, we arrived at the start line. TWALK requires teams to race the first leg in costume, and we decided to pay homage to the club logo (and commit ourselves to 24 hours of picking up all of the stuffing that would inevitably fall off). The race began, and many hills, barbed wire fence crossings, and taped blisters later, we made it to the Hash House (the base where the rest of the legs would start and end from). I’d only had to wipe cow shit off one control (and was eating chicken crimpy shapes with the same hand 10 minutes later), and after one strategic clue swap with some monks, we’d racked up some good points.
A medical event forced us to abandon ship at control 2 of leg 2 and retreat towards the Hash House. We managed to convince all of the teams coming up the hill that we’d in fact completed the entire leg already (just in the other direction), and received much unjustified praise.The Gorilla Zone marked on the map was too tempting to pass up, and we successfully recovered our team banana whilst screaming at another poor team who we mistook for the apes. We collected 3 points and immeasurable joy as we frollicked through a field in the moonlight, hooting our best Gorilla impressions.
Our premature return to the Hash House put us briefly into 1st place, and we stocked up on snacks and torch batteries to prepare for legs 3a + 3b. The first few controls looked easy to find on the map - but in true TWALK fashion, nothing was as simple as it seemed (turns out paper plates aren’t very good at surviving hail storms?). Near-vertical gorges and streams with dubious water quality made finding controls difficult, and as the night wore on we climbed over the range to try our luck in the East. A cheeky caffeine pill got the pep back in our step, and the 3am sausage sizzle at the mini hash house hit the spot. Jackson and Nathan were in the pain cave and opted to slog it back to the main Hash House along the road (see image of them losing the will to live) whilst Max, Rewa, Patrick, Beth and I embarked on 3b. 600 milligrams of caffeine, too many steep climbs and a summit sunrise later, we hobbled back into the Hash House. Sheppard’s pie for breakfast had never tasted so good. Beth, Patrick and I decided to torture our feet a little more by embarking on leg 4, and coaxed our 23,760,832 blisters up some hills to find 6 more points. We started to fall asleep while searching, and made our final push back to the Hash House to find some of the professional athlete's ultimate racing fuel that is hashbrowns.
Overall, we came 21st out of 97 teams, and were 7th in the student competition. We ran 62km, climbed 2,855m of vertical elevation, and consumed far above the recommended daily amount of caffeine. We sweated, cried, consumed too many sour squirms, hugged, held fences down, had existential crises, dodged cow carcasses and cow shit, sang, and cursed whoever thought paper plates were waterproof. Kate spent her 24 hours volunteering at the hash house - baking muffins, singing along to ABBA, deep frying hashbrowns, and being really glad she wasn’t running around in circles. All in all, the Lost Sheep had a bloody good crack at it.
If this trip report hasn’t convinced you to come race in TWALK next year, just know there’s no better way to bond with your fellow VUWTC members than peeing 5 metres apart in an open field. Get after it, sheeple.