Sunday, October 11, 2009

Hang on guys we missed a bit!

SH3 Runs 1477 and 1478, 3rd and 10th October
and Hatyai H3 run 457, 4th October 2009




There's no doubt about it! As you can clearly see, we missed the little bit between the 1477 short run (light blue) and the 1478 long run (red) just before they hit the 1477 long run (dark blue). The HH3 run (yellow) doesn't touch it at all. But other than that we seem to have comprehensively covered that bit of country.
Actually, it just goes to show that even though you run a bit of hill 3 times in eight days you hardly scratch the surface of all that is out there. The whole area bounded by the four runs together is barely 3 square kilometers and there must be miles of tracks in there that we didn't use (excluding Gan Yao who probably covered most of them in his relentless pursuit of the ultimate short cut).
SH3:1477 was a live-Egg long run with a substantial short run laid based on a single recce by Only a Yolk, who eschewing all modern aids (compass, red markers, GPS, evolution etc.) boldly set out on her own at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday morning to lay the trail, and was within a whisker of proving that the traditional way is best, before losing her sense of direction and blundering off into the jungle strewing shreddie in all directions, eventually happening upon the only know misanthropes in the south of Thailand who having declined to give her directions back to the run site, accused her of stealing rubber and demanded to inspect her bag of g'dat before allowing her on her way, to be rescued at about 12:30 by her own personal knight in shining armour, summoned thence by the only bit of modern equipment at her disposal, viz her mobile phone.
For the record, the live hare on the long run marginally bested the pack, returning to the run site in 1 hour and five minutes, 5 minutes ahead of the somewhat stunned short runners who hadn't been expecting an almost 4k run, and 22 minutes ahead of the long runners who had set off a couple of minutes before 4:30, but still lost about 9 minutes on a fairly vertical ascent of the biggest hill in the area. No killer checks this time, but the cumulative effect of stopping and searching every 600 meters or so was enough to see the hare home and dry before the pack had started the great descent.
Knackerwurst presided at the circle and R2D2 butled. Pig Porker was a returning runner, Yardstick was unjusty accused of not calling on and declined to get his bum wet, but Only a Yolk consented to being iced for bringing the Hash into disrepute.
The following day the early arrivals at the HH3 runsite just round the corner, were greeted by the sight of Off T disappearing into the jungle with a bag of shreddie over his shoulder. Advertised hare, Porky Sex err... Sexy Pig announced that since his GPS had no batteries and he had injured his leg, he had been unable to set the run and Off T had bravely consented to stand in and was doing a live hare. This sent the pack into a frenzy and the run was only 5 minutes late in starting, giving the hare a good 35 minutes start. Any real hope of catching him was dashed by a first check which must have taken 10 minutes to break and the complexity of which should have indicated that it was unlikely to have been laid by someone setting a run in fear of being caught and debagged. Nevertheless we ploughed on at a fair old rate and were soon into the same bit of country as most of us had run the day before, running along part of the long run trail, almost crossing it again, then after a quick detour around the hill actually crossing it at the top of the Beaverchute (shoot?) before plunging back down to the run site to be greeted by the sight of Off T looking remarkably fresh and significantly in-breath, and in hysterics to boot as he admitted that the run had in fact been laid several hours before. As Porky Sex said, it had been a 'lie hare' run! Sage heads were shaken in disbelief, not so much at the fact that we had mostly all fallen for the joke, but that the run had been little short of brilliant.
Finally in this omnibus account of our recent doings, Sex Sprinter and Buk Toy in the latest episode of their fatally doomed attempt to set more runs than anyone else this year (Heh! Heh! Heh!) chose a run site for SH3:1478 half way up the big track up the same hill, where we all squeezed in (or we would have done had there been enough of us to get into a squeeze) and wondered how the hares were going to avoid all the paper strewn around during the last weekend. The answer was that they didn't; they just got on with laying their own run which suffered not one iota for the fact that it criss-crossed all three of the other runs reported on herein.
Rotten presided at the circle, Egghead butled: Freelance returned and Frank out of Yardstick was a new runner; Egghead sinned and Jackie was named Kan Kai, continuing his family's proud tradition of ball-related names.
The circle ended in the dark suggesting that a shift to a 4:00 p.m. start is probably overdue. Not that that is going to help our numbers which show no sign of recovering above the steady thirty-something who are currently turning out. Lots of good reasons why the absentees are absenting themselves but that doesn't stop it feeling a bit lonesome on the trail at the moment! Perhaps they're just waiting for the birthday run to come back! Hope so.
Egg

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