Jabulani

I'm running in an event on Sunday.  It's called Jabulani which means "happy" in Zulu.  Apparently.  Happy'ish is what my training buddy Mia and I were until Monday morning when we flicked casually onto the website to find out when we got our tshirts (always got to get the important things sorted first).  It was only then we found out they had turned the course around.  Let me set the scene.  We are running 43kms through the National Parks of Sydney.  We know these trails well having run and walked hundreds of kilometres in there.  But when the Start ends up being the Finish and you've mentally visualised the hills and the tricky parts, it throws you to find out that we have been training for the last 8 weeks THE WRONG WAY.  Of course a phone call was in order and as this is a feel good fundraiser, we tried to keep calm and happiness in our voices.  Apparently because we haven't done this before, and we were one of the first to register, we've missed out on being on some database that actually kept everyone informed.
The organiser was apologetic and offered us a ride home from the event (?), in full swing I elaborated that we had competed (cough) EXTENSIVELY in events in Australia and New Zealand.  And that we were very disappointed as we were keen to give it a Red Hot Go on Sunday (actually I said that twice).  He responded by saying they had a cup for the first place and he hoped he'd see one of our names on it.  Oh shite.  Frantic back pedalling now urgently required.  It is likely that Mia and I will be bringing in the course flags and will act as informal "sweepers" at the end of the course (i.e. last)
So not wanting to be victims or negative in anyway we are heading out on Sunday onto a course some of which we know and a big chunk of which we don't.  And it's supposed to be raining.  And windy.  Our goal was to run as much of this as we can.  But we know some of those hills are kickass, we know this because in our training we smugly ran DOWN them.  We're also starting with a friend who is training for the Oxfam 100km Trailwalker in 3 weeks, when he came out on a training run with us, he had to skip beside us to slow his natural pace down.  We almost booted him out at that point "Skippers Not Welcome."
There's not much point to this post, other than to set the scene for the post event post.  And it's not really all that bad.  When you see the fabulous work our little bit of money raised has done for the Stellenbosch Community Development Programme, in South Africa, it's hard not to feel "jabulani".