Today I rushed out of the office after working half a day to get to Arad as early in the afternoon as possible in order to help to mark the Sport course for the race/event tomorrow. I arrived at 3pm, no thanks to one driver doing some 70km/h on the shoket/arad road with no way to pass him. Anyway!
I got into a jeep with a city employee who drove us out onto the course. In the back were metal rods and corrugated plastic signs with arrows on them, and the plan was to pound the rebar rods into the ground with a hammer and use plastic zip-ties to attach them. Well, it hasn’t rained since May here, and the ground was just a bit firm. In places I’d have had better luck pushing the rebar into dried cement.
Eventually, we did manage to get about 1/3 through the course, and were approaching the outskirts of the Nahal army base. We’d heard gunfire for some time, but I had just attributed it to soldiers practicing in the outdoor ranges. At some point, after a fun downhill, the course takes a turn to the right and joins up with the base’s road after the practice ranges for about 750m before turning again into Nahal Letaot.
We came up over the shoulder onto the road, and I started to realize that the gunfire was coming from behind the ranges. Then I started to see puffs of smoke on a hill a bit further up the road. In the fading light (it was about 16:30), I started to make out soldiers moving all over the terrain on both sides of the road - and firing. We’d stumbled accross a live-fire drill. Worse still, they were training to secure a road. This meant that bullets were flying back and forth accross the road we needed to mark about 500m from us. Crap. This is not good.
Eventually we got to a soldier who told us the obvious, and said we could not pass(no, really?). They were supposed to finish at 17:15. Hoping they’d actually finish on time, I decided we’d wait.
In the end, they did finish but no sooner than we left the road, the fuse for the Jeep’s headlights died and being a municipal vehicle, there were no spares. We limped back to Arad, and Martin’s now out marking the trail in the middle of the night while I get ready to lead the pack out tomorrow on the ride.
I often complain a lot about what is missing in Israel: no AR, hard to find gear, people don’t want to pay for events/gear, lack of this or that, limited selection or sizes…etc….ok, you get the picture. So for a change, let’s focus on the positive: what makes it unique here. How many other places in the world can someone run into machine-gun fire while setting a mountain bike race? 
See you at the race tomorrow!
[tags]israel,arad,mtb,race,guns,military[/tags]
