Lost in the woods and loving it

A friend and I set out to run a loop in nearby Fall Creek state park this weekend. Instead of a loop we ended up running a little over 8 miles, with about 7 of the 8 miles being entirely uphill. I’m not talking slightly up hill, I’m talking full-tilt-slightly dizzy-out of breath-quads burning-calve splitting endless dirt and sand headed straight up to high heaven.

I had a lot of time to think on this run. Usually when running together we talk nonstop, but the nature of this run made conversation all but impossible. I thought about how nice loops are to run with new scenery the whole run through. I thought about how my friend who is turning 40 this week must be super woman incarnate because at 31 I was definitely feeling my age with each shortened stride. I had moments of clarity when the pain and breathlessness and light cast through the redwoods morphed into near hallucination and I wondered anew at the beauty we have in our backyard.

I also wondered how in the hell we can put a man on the moon and have eight piece wine-openers (you know, the fancy one you got from your boss/friend/co-worker last year) but not design a sports bra that actually works. Or why the map at the bottom of the park didn’t show the northern most parts of Fall Creek—did they simply assume no one in their right mind would venture that far from the map way back down by the creek? And why after this much time on trails we don’t routinely carry water, a cell phone and mace (for hydration, help and the probably entirely false feeling that we could have a chance against a mountain lion).

We stopped a few times at signs that pointed the wrong direction, always assuming that just a ways farther up the trail would be the truck trail that we knew eventually connected with the trail we were on. By the time we considered turning back around it didn’t make sense--not that downhill didn’t sound good, just not another 8 miles of it. An hour and forty-five minutes into it, without water or food we decided to head to the road, flag down someone with a cell phone and call one of our husbands for a ride back down to the high school parking lot where my car was waiting.

When my friends’ husband arrived he couldn’t believe how far up the hill we were. We’d walked out of the forest at Summit Drive on Empire Grade road—which means nothing if you don’t know the area, but basically we were as high as you can get around here. He also couldn’t believe how bad we stunk. Reflecting in the backseat on the ride back down to my car I realized that there is maybe nothing quite as fun as having the time to get lost—not truly lost fearing for your life and well being, but lost discovering new territory and securing another adventurous memory with a friend.