4 pax total for an old-school direction River Rat 10k loop (fka “The River Rat”). We used to always run this direction, but traffic gets too bad on the BFR after 5:30am… who’d have thought.Jorel gets credit for matched effort, but was a bit behind due to a snooze malfunction? Normally, as of the last couple years, we would run the reverse direction because of the aforementioned reasoning. And, as Jorel is usually late, he’ll run the old-school direction and meet up with us about halfway.Well, this morning at Rural Hill, The Loch Norman Highland Games were afoot. Rural Hill has had not-so-friendly security guards in the past, and we didn’t want to take our chances. You see, if you run to Rural Hill The reverse route, you are at mile 4 and your 10k becomes 8 miles. If you run the original direction, you hit the back gate of Rural Hill at mile 1.75…less likely to be security and your 10k becomes 5k-ish. Rural Hill is a cut through that we have been using for about 6 years. They made a way around the gate for us so we wouldn’t keep climbing over it. We’ve only been stopped once, not because of Rural Hill, but because of some power-hungry security guard hired by an event planner. We consider that stretch of gravel road ours for about 2 minutes every Saturday before sunrise. We respect it, they respect is (I think). But, I digress.All this to say, we went old school today. Jorel did, too. We paid the price with dodging more cars on the BFR and never getting to see Jorel. I owe him a coffee and some conversation.