Twas a modest hash that turned out for a night run in celebration of love and valentines. We were in Ob Khan, and it seems the hare had had a hell of a day! Poo admitted to hospital, leaving KO to set the run with her “Kik”, or brother as she claimed… Clearly quite a bit of thought had gone into it though, with love hearts for checks, prizes to be won, and pink paper to follow… Pink? Hmmmz…
A couple of hashers (Alice & Turkish) had decided to do the run blind, and not bring any kind of torch, while the rest of us took a torch… A “white” light torch. KO admitted she’d asked the opinion of Poo when picking the colour of paper, perhaps not her wisest choice, because other humans see light from the electromagnetic spectrum, waves with wavelengths between 390-700 nanometers. This of course contains all the pure colours, like those in the rainbow when light is refracted. It doesn’t include unsaturated colours such as pink or magenta as they can only be seen by combining multiple wavelengths. Most of us had torches, so we could shine a bright white light source into the darkness, and of course we are able to see different colours based on how that light is absorbed by different objects – we see a red t-shirt because the shirt absorbs all the colours EXCEPT red, the red reflects off the shirt and our eyes are trained to “see” red. The same for green leaves – all the other light is absorbed by the green leaves, and green is reflected back… All previous night runs that I’ve been on have used white paper, white paper.. WHITE paper FFS!!! If an object appears to be black, it is simply absorbing ALL the light, if an object appears to be white, it is not absorbing anything, it is simply reflecting all the light back! If an object is a small pink strip of paper it might stand out from a green leaf when there is plenty of light, but using torches, it takes a miracle to see it!
We set off, and we still had some daylight, and Brownie wanted to run from the start. Something about legs needing to warm up after a hill on Thursday. We jogged along, and finally got to a check – grabbed some paper and I headed right, while he carried on. I was correct, although it was some distance before I found paper – gone is the day of KO doing 10m checks! A nice, familiar trail around to another “heart” shaped circle. I went left on the obvious road, and went a good distance, before exploring the hill a bit. Back to the check and nobody had called, so I explored the quarry area, again nothing, and no calls. I remembered we’d used before back a bit, but today there was a big white barbed wire covered gate blocking the way. I had a hunch that gate was open a few hours earlier, so decided to go on the road where I’d checked first around to the other end of the trail. Most of us did the same, and sure enough we were back on paper. Who needs the hare when we could just guess where they might have set paper instead!?
We jogged for a bit and then another unexplained stretch of paperless trail??? Had someone really pulled it down? We hunted around a bit, before continuing the only sensible way, and sure enough were back on paper. Very difficult to follow in places, but we persisted, sometimes doing our own thing, other times finding paper. Fortunately the area lends itself to great trail running, so we all found our own loops and got back one way or another.