Like most of my races lately, I have absolutely no intention of doing the Waite Teams Challenge thing or whatever it’s called because I don’t even know why, I just don’t. And then, about a week out from the event the Race Director, in a master stroke of marketing, announces he has literally zero entries in the 40+ mixed teams category and I’m like, fuck, I could win. So obviously I’m in. #GloryHunter

Having mixed personalities, none of them particularly good, won’t make the cut as a team, so I recruit Tracy from ioMerino to be my mixed partner. Think Nick Kyrgios and Venus Williams at Wimbledon this year. She’s a fucking legend and he can be a bit of a fucking dickhead with a stupid haircut. Accurate.

Tracy’s also way faster than me but she’s been injured and she’s a good person so I figure she’ll be patient and wait for me. I warn her that I’ll be slow and annoying and she says that’s OK with her because she’ll be annoyingly slow also and she really didn’t understand I meant slow and annoying but I decide to let it slide because I really need a team mate and I really want to win.

As usual, I don’t look at the race briefing info til quite late in the week and thank fuck I don’t leave it til Saturday night like I usually would because the race is on Saturday and who the fuck even has an event on a Saturday? And then I realise there’s a typo and they’ve actually put the race start time as 1pm and it’s not a typo and who the fuck even has an event at fucking lunch time? I’m usually eating pizza or in bed, or eating pizza in bed, by 1pm on a race day and this is just fucking weird. But not as weird as it gets at the end. But hang in there, we’ll get there. And we’ll go the right way there. Just for shits and giggles.

The good news is, the race start means I have time to stretch and do a yoga class that morning as well as clean my gutters from the torrential downpour the night before which saw me chasing waterfalls on my front verandah. The bad news is I only do one of those things and it’s not the yoga class. Or the stretching.

I spend most of the morning just fucking about, wasting time, wondering if it’s time to get ready yet, until I’m actually late, and don’t. even. I stop at the servo quickly and smash a cheese and spinach pasty, grab a red bull, and a four pack of Krispy Kreme for after the race and mmmm…. doughnuts. Because as the old saying goes, ‘proper planning prevents pissweak performance” or whatever it is… and in my case, proper planning means mmmm…. end of race doughnuts.

The long 20km course, actual distance and course optional, starts at 1pm so I have an extra half hour to sip my Red Bull, race some guy to the dunny to have a wee, and do some last minute scratching about.

The race briefing is short, sharp and shiny and I’m mostly being a dickhead taking stupid selfies but managed to hear something about running through someone’s backyard after the switchbacks which actually comes in handy later when I’m running through someone’s backyard and know I’m going the right way.

We walk across to the start line and there’s a lady literally just casually drinking a cup of coffee and it makes me feel much better that I’ve just smashed a Red Bull.

The first part of the course is a relatively gentle incline aaaaand… we’re walking. It’s a fairly small field of runners and pretty much all of them are now in front of us. And fuck knows how we’re gonna win this now. Especially because I’m pretty sure we weren’t the only ones glory hunting and I think there’s at least three teams in our category now but hey, we’ll at least podium. Or would if there was one.

The good news is, I fucking hate running up hills, and also can’t, so walking is fine with me. Tracy is generally a WAAAAY faster runner than me, but she’s coming back from injury, and hurt her ankle the day before bouldering, which puts her about on my pace so we actually run together pretty well.

We’re about 3.5kms in (at least according to the sign) when we get to an intersection that requires a degree in navigation and literature to get through. Apparently we’re now in an intellectual adventure race escape room that requires us to decipher the stupidest fucking direction signs ever to know which way to go. OK, look, to be fair there’s a blue arrow pointing left, (which may or may not be the long course colour), but then… only marginally less words than one of my Facebook posts to read and fuck is this a fucking trail race or the MS Readathon? There’s at least three or four teams there scratching their heads when we roll up and due to my superior intellect, tell everyone it’s a lefty. But actually it’s because in a rare display of smarts, and because the race didn’t start til 1pm, I actually downloaded the course in to my Garmin that morning and even then, I’m not overly confident it’s left, but fuck it, off we go.

The first part of this loop is downhill and Tracy and I bomb down hard and get in front of everyone and I spend the entire time saying “fuck I hope this is the right way” and looking at the little purple line on my Garmin which confirms we are but I’m still not sure, because the last thing I want to do is turn around and go back up. At this point we get to a hairpin turn and turn around go back up anyway and fuck going back up. On the way back up Wee Man and his running partner pass us so I give them the Sputnik wave of support.

That’s how you mark a motherfucking course.

We pass back through the mystery intersection and get to another one which thankfully, clearly just says Long Course Right, Short Course Straight up, and seriously, how fucking hard is it to just do that everywhere? We go straight up, run next to some cows, I take a selfie because obviously, and there’s some more downhill we bomb down and I make fart noises and some jokes about stepping in the massive cowshits and note to self, never be a smart ass and make a joke about stepping in cow shit because you know why. The trail is still pretty slippery from all the rain, and I go from running a pretty handy 5min/km pace to about a 4:30min pace. On my ass. In cowshit. Sliding down the trail trying not to die. I manage to avoid the worst of it but looking at my GoPro afterwards, it’s definitely shit of some sort. I’m not entirely sure it isn’t my own.

After a couple of big bombs downhill we still haven’t caught up to anyone and it’s at this point I start to think that maybe some of the teams didn’t do the Escape Room Loop Navigation Readathon Challenge because how the fuck have we not seen a single team in front of us? Of course, we could be just super slow, and we kind of are, but our downhill bombs are pretty handy and there’s literally no way we haven’t seen at least one other team if we’ve all run the same way and distance.

We run through someone’s backyard, hopefully the right person’s, see some fucking weirdo crouching down taking pics in the creek which is exactly what I’d usually be doing, go past a mostly useless drink stop at the 10km mark of a 13km race which I used anyway because hey why not, and despite the sub-freezing temperatures I’m still sweating like a Sputnik wondering if I’m gonna get in trouble for writing the last few paragraphs of this blog, take a quick mandatory dog selfie, and then it’s one last bomb to the finish line which is quite fun. Especially because we’ve done the short course and not the long one so aren’t completely toast, even if we were old fashioned and did the whole actual course.

As we cross the finish line I want to very proudly show my Garmin stats to prove we did the whole course but the RD is all over it and confirms a bunch of people failed the Amazing Race Navigation Loop Escape Room Intellect Literacy Challenge and I start to think that despite being almost dead last, and probably about eight hours behind the winners, we might do a Steve Bradbury, and win by default for doing the actual course. And geez I sure can be a naive dickhead sometimes because apparently there’s a rule I wasn’t previously aware of, that running the actual course doesn’t matter if you win by enough, and so the winners in all categories are awarded regardless of whether they did the actual course and distance or not and seriously, what. the actual. fuck. How is that even a rule?

Now, I know what you’re thinking, what a loser. And a sore loser. But I can honestly, 100% hand on where my heart should be, say I didn’t give a shit about winning because I never have, and never will, win anything to do with running ever. (I can also hand on heart say I stalked our category winner’s Strava this morning and am pretty sure they did the actual course too! So well done them but also damn them for beating us fair and square. Bastards.) I mean, sure, I’ve podium-ed before, but only by default when there was less than three people in my category. Which to me is brilliant and hilarious but also completely meaningless. But how is there a rule that says if you win by enough it doesn’t matter if you do the course or not? Is it just me or is that just fucking weird? OK, it’s probably just me. As you were.

(Speaking of fucking weird, this also happened and, not for me to judge because I’ve committed some pretty serious crimes against fashion over the years, but does anyone have any idea what’s going on here?)

After all that, because I’m me, I’m somewhat enthusiastically discussing ‘The Rule’ with friends in the car park, saying how fucking weird it is, and that if I’d shorted a course I would refuse to take the winner’s prize because where’s the fucking integrity in that, when I turn around and yeah, of course there’s one of the short cut winners right behind me and fucking oops. But hey, each to their own. I had fun, and having not had a drink for 14 years, can probably live without the bottle of wine prize. But still, fucking weird.

Definitely looking forward to my next race though where I’m just gonna run wherever the fuck I want and cross the finish line and claim it.

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