Apologies in advance for this newsletter, as it's going to be a bit more about laying the trail than about running it.

While attending an impromptu mismanagement meeting at Dublin Pub on Friday night, I began to wonder what new deviltry I could play on the pack that coming Sunday, as well as how I could minimize the amount of effort I needed for haring that day. After a couple of beers courtesy of EMP, the idea hit me. What I needed was a way to make a trail easy to lay, but hard to run. Something in a well-known, confined space like Gorky Park, where the need to run around aimlessly making sure that there was a way through would be obviated. Some way to set checkpoints in that space in such a way that there would be more than one trail to and from each without having to lay all the routes myself.

And then I thought of alphabet soup.

And it gave me the answer.

Make Me Come and I proceeded to Gorky Park on Sunday morning to set the trail, armed with paper, pens, flour with red food coloring from the Green Bazaar, and twenty slips of paper, two sets of each letter of the English alphabet from A to J. Starting near the park entrance, we laid down the circle and checkpoint 'A', then set a timer for five minutes. We walked five minutes due east and marked checkpoint 'B' near that location. At each checkpoint we laid directions indicating backwards and forwards, and buried the two slips of paper with snow and colored flour.

When we reached 'C' we had hit the fence that encloses the water park, and turned north, walking another five minutes to where 'D' would be, then turned back west to place 'E'. At that point, we split; I walked across from 'D' back to 'B', adding a trail and another possible path choice at checkpoint 'B'.

We proceeded like this, laying a rough grid three letters deep by four letters wide throughout the park, making diagonal connections and blank checks along intersections when possible to connect as many checkpoints as possible to other checkpoints.

In theory, rather than laying any explicit 'false trails' for the run, all paths would be 'true'. But the game would be to run the checkpoints in a given order; so that although every path from each checkpoint did lead to another checkpoint, it might not be the right one at the right time; so everyone would have to backcheck to the previous checkpoint and try another route. Almost any route could end up being a checkback, theoretically, and it wouldn't require any extra effort for the hares to create this.

Of course, it didn't turn out quite that easy. Making the diagonal routes proved a little more challenging than we thought, as park obstacles and other problems led to getting lost and some backtracking. However, we still managed to set 10 checkpoints in about 2 hours. We also knew that if the pack chose correctly, it would be a pretty brisk run, perhaps as short as 30 minutes. If they didn't, it could be a lot longer.

Back at the computer, we printed out another forty pieces of paper, twenty each (in case we had a big turnout) with sequences of letters for the walkers' and runners' trails. The runners got a long trail, hitting all the checkpoints by the longest routes and hitting several checkpoints twice, on the way out in the beginning and on the way back. They got ABCDHIJGEDCBA. The walkers got AFEGHDCBA.

Of course, the most fun out of this run was getting to see the faces when we handed out the papers. Luckily, PedFac (who always enjoys a thoroughly confusing walk) was on hand, as well as former GM Jackmaster, who was so starved for a decent run with a bit of beer that having to choke down a bit of alphabet soup first probably seemed like a fair deal.

The final instructions were that the running and walking groups should stay together, and designate a front-runner and front-walker to collect the buried papers with the checkpoint letters; these would be looked at in the circle to see if the hounds were honestly checking all the checkpoints they should be.

After the obligatory moaning and groaning about the unusual trail, nipped in the bud by a few threats of extra down-downs in the circle later, the two groups had to decide which direction to go in, as checkpoint 'A' right in the circle now had three possible directions to walk in.

The walkers chose more or less correctly right off the bat, heading off not in the most direct route to their first checkpoint, but by a way that would bring them . The runners were less lucky, running first down to 'F' before then backtracking to quickly find 'B' and 'C' without much effort. Finding 'D' proved more difficult, not because of not knowing the right direction to run in, but because the hounds ran right past the checkpoint. A sluggish hare soon alerted them to the fact that the trail they were on wasn't the right one (inadvertently shortening the run-- should have let them go on) and they backtracked to find D.

The direction from 'D' to 'H' wasn't obvious, though, and the pack ended up meeting with the walkers, who had backtracked from 'A' towards 'F' but were unable to find 'E'. They bumped into the runners in the middle of the park, who figured out then that they weren't heading towards 'H' and so backtracked to 'D' to find a new path. From there, the 'HIJ' leg was easy to find, if a bit difficult to run because of an icy slope down and then up.

From there, led by Jackmaster, the pack improvised a bit. They knew they had already found 'F' and thought they knew where it was, but then struck off in another direction and found 'G' first. Finding 'F' turned out to be more difficult than they thought, and after that, they had to make their way to 'E', which they had heard about but not seen.

Again they ran into the walkers, who were now looking for 'G', which the runners had found. Some of the hounds tried to arrange an exchange of information, but the walkers would have none of it. They scrambled off in the direction the runners had come, and the runners did the same, running right smack into 'E', more or less in the middle of the park. From there, it would seem obvious which way would be back to 'D', but the pack almost headed off the wrong way. Pumpkin Eater set them straight, and soon the runners were back in the circle at 'A', waiting for the walkers to catch up.