Girls Lost for Months in Woods. One Found Eating the Other's Sleeping Bag

This was our last weekend of training. The last weekend of long distances, long talks and reminiscing about the last five months - at least before the big race.

Saturday we decided to do our seven-mile run around Harriet and Calhoun. We met at the boat house at 8:30am. The sky was heavy with rain, but we were only getting a drizzle at this point. It was humid, but still early enough in the day that the air was cool. I waited for Molly and watched people run by on the paths. The longer I waited the more I began to realize that it was all women running by. For no apparent reason, all of the runners that morning seemed to be women. All shapes and sizes, some hauling ass - long legged crazy runners, older women who were clearly in better shape than me, larger women running with their friends, chatting away, happy as could be. It was kind of cool. But for some reason though I was crabby.

We started our run and I bitched for about the first three miles. Three miles of bitching, poor Molly. The air was getting thicker and thicker with humidity. We could see the clouds of bugs as we ran through them, we'd close our eyes and mouths tight, blah!

It was a hard run for me. My head wasn't in it and I was feeling anxiety about the race. What if I can't do this? What if I didn't train enough, I should have done more. But we finished the run, seven miles and I felt better. I talked through all the bullshit that was floating around in my brain and Molly listened. I needed that.

Molly was kind enough to figure out our Sunday ride. She found this great area north of the cities that looked wonderful, the Elm Creek Park Reserve. It sounded just magical. Our thought was that we would get a nice solid twenty-mile ride in. Sounds wonderful right? Well, it is wonderful if you actually LOOK at the map, which we did not do of course. We glanced at it. It looked pretty simple though. We parked off of Hayden Lake Road, we were going to follow the path south and back around the Reserve. We thought if the ride was too short, we could just do it again. Well, somewhere at the southeastern corner of the Reserve we screwed up - big time. We kept heading south, instead of looping back up north. Tooling along - talking, laughing. And then at some point we realized that we were definitely not in the Reserve anymore, still on bike paths, but defiantly somewhere else. And at this point we'd ridden twenty miles. We finally saw a Park Police car and asked for directions. Neither one of us could even remember the name of the damn park we were riding from, and of course our map was safely packed away in the car. The park-dude got out his map and showed us where we were. We both gasped and realized that we were way off course. Once we got our barrings and headed back.

"Follow the trails with the yellow dotted lines". Those seemed like easy instructions to follow, right? But what happens when you come to a fork in the road, yellow dotted lines stop and your not quite sure which way to go? We'd choose one path, realize it was the wrong one, turn around, realize that was wrong and turn around again. Sometimes at these intersections there would be a map, we'd see where we were and try to head north. It probably took us an hour to ride sixteen miles, which for us is pretty damn slow. At one point I was laughing so hard I almost fell off my bike. Neither one of us brought any Gus or snacks with us, we were both running out of water, and we were tired from being lost. We were lost. But at least we were together. I remember the moment we saw our parking lot. It was like finding a well of water in the desert. We both yelled our Hallelujahs and raced to the car.

We agreed that she and I are never allowed to go camping alone together. We'd be the people you would read about in the paper. "Girls Lost for Months in Woods. One Found Eating the Other's Sleeping Bag."