Frozen Dick has a unique way of advertising his runs and one way or another… This time he chose “my” area past Doi Saket, and through various conversations over the week he’d mentioned “blue spirit houses” and a couple of other unique landmarks that gave me a damn good idea of the general route of the run – having set a bunch of runs there and previously scouting all the trails (and non-trails) around there, I was confident I knew all the permutations…
We set off with Angry Inch on my tail – literally – he followed me through the first couple of checks until I guessed one wrong – there were 2 main ways to get up onto the mountain, and the hare chose the other one. No matter, we headed back to the road and Angry Inch was lost soon at a check when he went through barbed wire to a trail to nowhere. Shortly further on the other trail into the mountain was on the right, but the trail continued down the road – hmmm… Go for it boys, I turned to Chuckie and we swiftly avoided a false trail and set off up to the hill.
There was a circle check and CW trusted me when I told him it was up the hill to a parallel trail – sure enough we got to powder, and then a circle. This time he didn’t trust me, and while I checked left, he went back to the right. I called “On” but didn’t see him again. I jogged along, simply enjoying running the trails that I’d set as a hare before, but never run. I found the hare’s knife, and spent the rest of the run with it open as I couldn’t figure out how to close it.
Around the ridge we came to the spirit house and down to the creek bed. The circle check there is ingenious – if you don’t know about the trail that runs just a bit further along the creek. Sadly for FD I knew where we were and the likes of Sloppy Rod, Graven Image, Skid Mark and Horny Monkey came straight along the creek following my calls – leaving an unbroken circle for CW to figure out.
The rest of us FRBs were onto the trail behind the mountain – a great running trail! Hard to set checks, as ‘straight’ is the obvious choice. With Sloppy and Graven around 100m behind they kicked out the checks each time I called them, until we reached the inevitable “skiddy sticks” hybrid check, complete with my own powder bottle! I could have set a new trail, but played the game and went back to mark the way over the ridge.
Another couple of checks were straight on with Sloppy snapping at my heels and Graven licking his chops. We hit the fence and though I’d been there a bunch of times I wasn’t sure – left and then right, or right and then left? Bugger… Sloppy slipped away to the left and I hooked up with Graven, Horny Monkey and Skid Mark for the final moments.
That’s my story of the run… It seems other people had many different stories behind me – Mr. Poo sloping off with Doesn’t Get It to make sure she does… Unplugged slipping away with Angry Inch to see if the extra angry inch is worth it… Big Top lagging behind with Redundant Semen to ??? who knows what they were up to, but it took a while for them to get back with FD needing to separate them.