thing. That 9-hour epic could have been condensed into two hours if he had just slit his throat in the swamp near the beginning. But for some reason, James could not bring himself to slay this little grunting goblin thing that seemed to have some historical connection to these woods and the sport at a significant risk for his own wellbeing.
Don't get me started on LOTR and Gandalf's Alzheimers. "Ohhh, the eagles! I could have just flown the ring into Mount Doom on the Eagles! Rivers of blood and burned forest and a dead Sean Bean later, I have suddenly realised!"
Anyway
The loop has a checkpoint about halfway in, but you can see it two miles before you are in some twisting of the trail. The first time I saw it about 4 miles in, James was ascending the hill to start the 2-mile trip to the CP. That 2 miles took me ages, and I thought if he was still
waiting for me at the CP, he's an idiot.
Fortunately, he decided not to be an idiot, and he was long gone by the time I staggered in. Phew. At this stage, I was only doing 4 laps; this was going to be longer than 3.30 hours, and there was no way I was doing the last one faster than this. I was no longer running
anything.
I did consider the possibility of cutting the two miles out where the checkpoint was and getting a DQ. Then I could have a DNS/Finish/DNF and DQ for the year, a weird ultra flush. Ultra Flush sounds like a nasty chaffing problem; maybe I don't want to get that.
I'm going to rant about lumenwankers again. Fucking hell. There were a lot of people overtaking me while finishing their last loop. I don't like having people running behind me, so I get out of the way as soon as someone approaches, except sometimes I'd get out of the way. They are still about 100 meters behind with the sun strapped to their face. I
imagine these are the BMW drivers who blind me on country roads at night with their full beams in my face.
I think there is a kid's story somewhere; the quiet little hill goblins just want to potter about in the dark, but then the evil lumenwankers try to burn them out of the forest with their rechargeable beams of death. Whoah this got off track a bit, which is ironical as I didn't really go off track at all in the race. It's all really well signed. James messaged me to
say he was on the last loop, as I still had at least half an hour of this loop left, so it was very wise to ditch me.
I staggered in just under 12 hours. There were a lot of people gunning for the 5 loops in under 12. Near the end, I heard someone stumble and shout BASTARD, FUCK, FUCK, BASTARD or words from a similar corpus. I asked if he was ok, and he said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, I just nearly ended it there... I liked your book!" Dunno how he recognised me; perhaps it was my tiny lumens.
I arrived with Drew, waiting to see if I was up for a lap of sweeping the course markings with him since I'd be the last on the course at this stage. I declined; that loop took 4 hours, and we would not return till sunrise if I went out there. I hung around in the tent for James to finish, which he did amazingly.
Ultimately, this isn't the sort of thing you can just plod round with NO TRAINING. But I'm pleased with my effort; it's been a funny year again. I know I can get back to being able to being able to do this sort of stuff regularly. And maybe then I won't get so fucking grumpy about the fucking Lumenwankers.