~ Curious Charlie ~

Oxfam Trailwalker 2012 - Part 1 @ Friday, April 20, 2012

I don't usually do more than one post on an event (if you don't count the info today and pictures tomorrow posts), but I am doing a marketing project on the event, Oxfam Trailwalker Melbourne 2012, and I also "know"-ish ~~two people~~, one person walking it. The other one finished! :)

So the event is basically a fundraiser, fun run style, where you run x miles and people sponsor you/the team or just donate. It costs $700 to enter your team. The event is a trailwalk, through bushland, 100kms, in teams of 4 people (so hopefully you don't get lost, or eaten by a wild animal :P), and it goes over 48hrs. You start at WH (the suburbs) and end up at Wesburn (country-ish town past Lilydale - end of the line). Along the way there are checkpoints, food/water, camping grounds and a lot of scary portaloos.

Here's a map of the trail, the more interesting one. The other one just looks like google maps. Now I'm not sure I'm reading it right, but to me it looks like you'll be going up and down hill.

Click on it to make it bigger.

The event started at 7am this morning, and there are 745 teams. At the moment about 17.5hrs after it started, 23 teams have finished it. With the first team finishing at 4.52pm, a record of 9hrs. The top teams are pros, sport people, and they weren't teams of all boys, the 3rd team had a girl.

In events we're doing a project, 3 topics, and I chose the marketing focus where you also pick an event to study. It was between City Romp & Oxfam's Trailwalker, ms events tut chose Oxfam and mentioned ms events (not tut) was doing it. And that's how I got distracted and spent an hour or so looking up team names. There were some great ones. My two favourites were the Girl Scouts with Surely There's a Badge?! (they also blog!) & Run Walk Crawl :P (who finished at 11.04pm).

So where's everyone up to? Because I don't post names of people, and give them other names, and hopefully no one's stalkish (who reads my blog) enough to do some research. I'm going to post the teams with people I know. ~~Plus it might increase chances of them getting donations (they don't keep it, it's for Oxfam ;).~~ The two people I know-ish who are doing the event are Hector and Ms Events.

Hector's team came 13th place last time (14 hours 52 minutes), the goal was to beat that. This year they came 14th with a time of 14hrs 54mins ... minus one place and added 2 minutes. The team that came 13th beat them by 8minutes. :( But team Hector did finish the walk. :) Points for effort. They're probably disappointed, as they are one of the pro teams. I'd send a nice text to Hector, except we don't talk outside of college.

Meanwhile Ms Events is currently half way there, checkpoint 5 and as of 9.38pm appears to have decided to camp for the night. Only 50.5kms to go :) I'm working at checkpoint 5 tomorrow and might see her. Though the interesting thing is that I recognize her only by voice (online lectures) as I've never seen her in real life, and only seen pictures. Like Hector she's a sport pro, though her area of expertise seems to be more of lecturing about it.