The directions to the run site were clear and well advertised, but nonetheless managed to confuse several hashers who autopiloted down the canal road rather than Sameong. Nonetheless a large crowd gathered with virgins and visitors ready for what Bone Hur had in store. My plan was to walk off and take it easy – I’d even warmed up with a couple of beers in the afternoon – but Bone Hur got fed up of everyone ignoring him and gave an abrupt, abridged hare brief and sent us on our way with Mr. Poo unusually setting the early pace.
At the first check I was drawn in the direction of the temple steps – Bone Hur isn’t the most inventive guy in the world, and from that runsite the obvious route is up the 969 steps to the temple and so it was. I hit the steps first, but was quickly overtaken by Mr. Poo who was on a mission today. Leah a young virgin came flying past all of us hardly breathing at all. A glance over my shoulder saw Brown Finger puffing and panting his way up cursing blasphemously as he saw the stairs continue towards the sky. If the hares had any intention of keeping the pack together, this wasn’t the way to do it – a good number of hashers simply rejected the stairs and short cut around while the rest were scattered over the steps.
After the summit we hit the trail that gradually descended around the hill. It was a great trail to run on, and Mr. Poo, Leah, Brown Finger, Graven Image and I broke away from the rest. There were a few checks that had BF diving into the woods in the hope of finding paper along unlikely trails – I just kept going down the trail and sure enough the trail was the obvious route along the road. At the bottom we ran into Semen Soars who’d shown up late, missed out on the hill, got lost and managed to get the wings for doing the run Bone Hur hadn’t intended – I’ll have to remember those criteria. There were walkers strewn across the rice fields and even then they chose to short cut while GI and I set the pace at the head of the runners.
The On-In was at the road and I was relieved that it was only 3.6km – less than half an hour. Fortunately the beer had just enough time to chill. Horny Monkey ran the circle again, and the usuals were punished for making funny comments that disrupted his train of thought.