A Throbbing Ninja run by the familiar trails near HTT. So familiar that Turkish Delight was out for a training run, saw us and came and joined in the fun, wondering what the hell we were doing there! He was on good form too, sprinting off at the start, and staying up with the FRBs throughout – the training must be paying off!
Memories of the last TN run cause nervous tension with the mountain looming – would she do it again? We set off and having been told it was about 4.5km, the mountain seemed the obvious direction. The usual place for a circle check. Right towards the lake, left along the bottom of the hills, or straight up the side of the waterfall? My gut said we were going to be going straight up, and for once I was right. I have bad memories of setting a truly terrible run up that trail in the past – I’d scouted the hell out of the area, and it didn’t end well – what would happen today?
Another couple of checks, and it was straight on up, up, up. Chuckie like a mountain goat crept up behind me, closer and closer, until when the trail took an abrupt turn to the left across the waterfall, he took over the charge. It wasn’t easy going, precariously balanced on the side of the hill with no real trail, just scrambling from paper to paper. Finally a trail, and the hares teased us by letting us use it for about 100m, before again cutting off into the unknown.
Finally we started descending, and Piggy, Turkey and Chuckie were with me as we charged down a nice trail. When we did get to a check, they didn’t think twice about following each other straight down, leaving me to do the dummy check back up the hill. Sure enough they were on, and the trail descended straight down to the main trail at the bottom of the hill. No check? Huh? Straight along the bottom back to the first circle, with the only confusion coming when we expected there to be checks and there weren’t. OnIn, and back home… It could have been worse!
After the circle was a visit to Coffee Monster, nice new restaurant / working place off the canal road.