I ran behind the pack. Their red lights blinked reassuringly in the darkness as they pulled away. I’d be certain to see where they turned, even if I fell way behind.
Which I did.
They pulled way ahead. But when they came to a cross street, I could see them stop where our route turned into the neighborhood. Problem is … they kept pulling away, and before long they were gone. No pack in the distance. No shadows of runners. No blinking lights. Nothing.
Whatever.
We’d run here before, so I couldn’t get lost. And we were running timed fartleks, anyway, so the official route didn’t really matter. As it happened, I had turned right where everyone else turned left. So I was on my own.
Whatever.
I ran the fartleks: two minutes fast, two minutes slow, six times. And I started a slow warm down on a made-up route, because there wasn’t enough distance between me and my car for a 1.5 mile warm down run. So I crossed a street and decided to jog another slow loop to make up the distance.
“Did I turn wrong somewhere?” a woman asked. She was wearing a white running jacket and had a red light somehow attached. She was standing in the shadows on the other side of the street.
“Oh, you’re really asking the wrong person!” I said, not elaborating further on my wrong turns and improvised loops.
She took out the slip of paper with the running map on it. “I don’t even know where we are.”
“Here,” I said. “We can go this way and rejoin the warm down route, or we can go back that way.” I pointed in the other direction.
“I just want to take the shortest path,” she said.
“Well that would be back that way. Let’s go.”