I was waiting for you to chime in. You're much more succinct than I am.
Sanders has this idea that an extra half kilometer (500m) isn't all that far, and might make things work out better if we didn't try to dig a shortcut (leaving the short course at 2.5 km) and ran 3 laps for the short race and 5 laps for the long, making the total distances come out to 7.5 (rather than 8 ) km for the short race and 12.5 (rather than 12) for the long.
Is this within reason? I already made sure with Larry that we could change the number of laps as long as the distance was the same, but is 500m too far to stretch things?
Part of me wants to (next year) make it a mystery distance prediction race and not have to worry about all of this, then we could make up the course the day before and nobody would be the wiser