Only 26 days into living in my apartment, I am having so much trouble finding my damned way around. Every pair of gray tacks on the linked map denotes a point where I paused my run last night, and you can follow along the route by dragging your cursor along the graphs showing elevation and mph at the bottom:
- Meh. Shoes untied early on.
- 5 miles later …. Wait, it’s dark. Where am I? ::Checks GPS:: I put on the On-The-Go playlist specifically intended for finding my way home. This is no time to learn about famous Vaudevillians from the Stuff You Missed In History Class podcast … Oh, so I just run this way, take a right … going straight, then … wait, it didn’t say this road was going to curve around. Why’s that high school on my left? ::Looks the other way, begins to mentally meld nighttime sights with memory of daytime:: Awww crap
- ::Checking GPS again:: So it’s 1.2 miles away now, not 1.0? I know you’re not supposed to be in this park here at night, but I just want to go home! Oh well … (you’ll notice here Mr. Blue Graph spikes to 9.3 mph for my illegal park running) I’m miles from where you are, I lay down on the cold ground, I, I pray that something picks me up … listening to tunes, running along, feeling confident …
- .9 miles later … What the hell is this wooden fence doing here? ::Checking GPS AGAIN:: And apparently I’m around the corner from the apartment.
So needless to say I’m still making sense of the winding roads, the changing street-names, the numerous park paths and sidewalks just running out like a Shel Silverstein poem in my new neighborhood! I think only finding time to run after work as dusk turns to darkness is always an adventure too. I could be a fitness guru with this method. You seriously burn at least twice as many calories and get way more incentive to go faster when you have no idea where you are.
