TWALK: An Annual Tradition

A few weekends ago, I had the great honor and privilege to participate in one of the University of Canterbury Tramping Club’s (in conjunction with the equivalent club at the University of Otago) biggest events: TWALK (which stands for ‘team walk’).

TWALK is a 24-hour orienteering race. If you’ve never heard of orienteering before, it is basically old-school navigation. On TWALK, you’re not allowed to use phones, but you are provided a topographical map and you can use a compass. That is it.

The race is composed of several legs (this year, there was a leg 1, 2, 3a, 3b, and 4), and it takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. On your provided topographical map are circled areas where you will find clues, and you’re also given a sheet with hints as to where precisely you can find those clues. Once you finish a leg of the race, you need to return to what functions as a home-base, called the ‘hash house,’ check in, and wait at least the required thirty minutes before starting the next leg. Most people are going to need sleep at some stage, but (as I learned), many of the bigger teams will sleep strategically, taking shifts so that at least a few representatives of the team are always out looking for clues.

My team was unusually small: just a friend and myself. It was the absolute minimum size for a team, and the Google Form suggested at least three to four, but we didn’t think much of that. We did not know just what lay on the horizon.

We started out strong. I was surprised that, at the outset of the race, everybody was running. I started to regret all the liters of water in my backpack...but I chugged along, determined to keep up with the mob. For the first leg, everyone wears costumes. I recall that for a large section of my initial run I was behind a man in a bathtub costume, who kept losing water.

We were making good time until The Disaster struck. I was making my teammate run. I saw that we had passed the eighth clue, but only by maybe a hundred feet. I said we should keep running to clue nine, and then turn back for the previous one because we needed to head in that direction for clue ten anyway.

We climbed up this enormous hill for the ninth clue. Then, I made us run again, back to clue eight. My teammate kept calling out to me, Are you sure we haven’t past it? Are you sure it was this far? And I kept repeating, I’ll know it when I see it!

Well, I didn't. We made it back to around clue seven, where we’d dropped our bags, and knew we had sped past clue eight. We circled back, our spirits a little crushed. On the way back, I realized why I had missed clue eight: with the mob of other people already gone and moved on, it was easier for the site of the clue to escape your notice. Searching for this eighth clue took us way longer than the previous ones had, with us almost giving up.

And that was what was truly disastrous about The Disaster: by deviating from the mob, the amount of mental and physical energy we needed to expend looking for clues shot way up. It had been infinitely easier when we could just follow the mob, see the places where they left looking satisfied, and head that way.

But, albeit at a slower pace, we finally finished Leg 1. We had collected all but one clue. We had set out around 1 pm, and reached the hash house a little after 5 pm. There, volunteers were constantly cooking and turning out (quite good!) food. I ate chili, apple crumble, and muffins, changed my socks, and refilled my water.

My teammate and I had the plan to rest a little after Leg 1,  head out for Leg 2,  be back around 2 am to sleep for four hours, and then head out again for Leg 3a. The hash house was so warm and comfortable, the food so good—especially after hours of alternate walking and running—that it was hard to drag ourselves back out. But, around 8:45 p.m., we did.

It’s hard to identify exactly how and where everything went wrong. Leg 2 was much harder because there were no trails (we had been off-trail for some of Leg 1, but Leg 2 really felt like just scaling random, gorse-y hills), it was completely dark, and, soon enough, we became very tired.

Both of us had bought a headlamp for this trip, but somehow mine inexplicably died after about half an hour. So we were in the dark hills, with only one headlamp between us.

We managed to find the first clue. Then, it was a lot of uphill: climbing up, up, these farm hills, watching the slow moving figures of sheep, sweating in our thermals. We finally reached the peak for clue 2, and we were stumped.

It was not anywhere, as far as we were concerned. The hint was vague; we only knew it was somewhere near tall grass. Tall grass was everywhere. We looked for around an hour. Then, we turned and went home. On the way down, we kept bumping into gorse and jamming our toes against the hard box of our boots. At one point, as we inched along the indistinct surface of a hill, I heard a rustling in a bush. I stopped: there was a vague black shape shifting around in the bush, sidling toward us. I worried something otherworldly had come to kill us. We changed course.

Somehow, we made it back around 2 a..m., and realized that we had spent about 5 hours on Leg 2. Five hours…we couldn’t fathom it. It was The Great Disaster. We went to bed, and we did not wake up—not until TWALK was about thirty minutes from over.

If all of this is making TWALK sound bad, then I have misrepresented what happened, or at least how dire it all was. I look back on TWALK very fondly. But if you’re going to go, three pieces of advice:

1. The bigger your team, the better.
2. Go all out with the costumes.
3. If you think you need sleep...get some sleep.

In the end, my team collected 11 clues—10 from the first leg and our measly one from the second. Who won in the end? The man with the bathtub, along with his team: 57 clues!

I think the best strategy is, if you’re already super tired (like we were), don’t push it going out for another leg. Have a big team, so you can stagger who’s looking and who’s resting. And, as always with the Tramping Club, bring a good sense of humor. It’s what keeps you sane on those hills.