The Monster, 15th Annual Edition

This was the track from yesterday morning's lay, so it doesn't show either the short run shortcut or the way back from the beer stop. It does show a whole lot of messing around when I was forced to cross my own paper and so had to relay the out-trail.

It wasn't even going to be a long run, but Egghead not unreasonably read that into the email I sent him with my misdirections. Plus I realized that it was the 15th anniversary of The Midsummer Monster, which I believe debuted on June 22, 2002. So I went out on a second recce and scouted the loop to the left you see above.

Now the problem with scouting different parts of a run on different days is that it's hard to know how long the whole thing is going to be when you put it together. And so when I was laying paper yesterday morning and realized that it was looking like about 16km in total, I had to improvise a shorter way back, resulting in the mess you see above.

Anyhow the long run was somewhere in the 12-13km range as set, with a total ascent of about 290m. It featured 10 false trails and 15 360s, all of which I tried to make pretty easy but apparently didn't always succeed. The short run was about 5km. Shortest run of the day was 1.7km by Little Tool, who joined me at the beer stop about 20 minutes after setting off. The longest run was by Innuendo, who probably did the whole thing and then some, taking about two hours. Altogether the beer stop was open for over an hour and a half and dispensed 30 beers, which has to be some kind of record. The hardcore then carried on to a birthday event at the elegant home of Throbbin' Hood and Just In Not Yet.