When I woke up this morning, I wrote off the hash, my ribs were still too painful, but as a shitty day at work wore on, the beer seduced me, and I set off with the intention of doing as little as possible to get back to the beer – as it turns out the hares were on the same page!
The first problem was finding the runsite – I’d been there before, but couldn’t quite remember which way to go – a problem when the hare didn’t have signs… Belly Dancer had marked some of the route, but then he’d got lost so I was following his signs to nowhere for a while – when I phoned the hare, he had no idea where he was, or where the signs were – an ominous sign, but after a few random guesses I found my way to the waiting songthaew. It seems I wasn’t alone in having difficulty, and of all the ironies, it was Belly Dancer who was squirming about getting off, and being afraid of getting stuck in the dark…. hmmmmmm….
We set off, and fortunately for the late comers, it didn’t matter as we spent the first half an hour zig zagging around the car park, so that Humperdick (Grumpy Dick?) and Jungle Chim were able to join us easily. Turkish Delight got confused between holding and pushing, and tried to kill Mr. Poo and I as he launched himself off a ledge. Finally the hares found the trail they wanted us to take up the hill – it seemed we had been following their headless chicken dance in the meantime.
I had my strategy in place – the moment we set off towards the hills, I would duck off back to the songthaew – and so it was. First a V check with the obvious trail heading up – thanks Square Rooter, serves you right finding a false trail. Next up a circle – again, obvious trails up, so it was time to short cut back – and I was on paper again. Had I been running this thing seriously I would have been getting them all wrong, today I was trying to short cut and kept hitting trail. The trail got a bit confusing as we found paper in all directions, but they all seemed to lead to a Wimp/Rambo split – the Wimp looks so tempting, but we are about 2km in, so I should keep going a bit longer.
We hit the flat road along the edge of a lake, and everyone ran off ahead of me as I walked along, only to meet them all running back at me away from some angry dogs. Again there was paper everywhere as we promptly found trail leading around the lake, back towards where we’d just been. Another V check screwed Square Rooter again (excellent!) and then we were back to an arrow that seemed so familiar. Jungle Chim charging on up front suddenly stopped as we got back to the wimp / rambo split. He seemed completely confused as though he had no idea we were back where we’d been before, so I suggested doing the rambo again in case it was different this time… It took him some time to consider it, so I skipped past to the On-In on the Wimp Trail… I lucked out and it was only about 3km, the hares had done their best to confuse everyone without tiring us out too much. At least we weren’t stuck out in the dark!