I ran behind the pack. Their red lights blinked reassuringly in the darkness as they pulled away. I\u2019d be certain to see where they turned, even if I fell way behind.<\/p>\n
Which I did.<\/p>\n
They pulled way ahead<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n Whatever.<\/p>\n We\u2019d run here before, so I couldn\u2019t get lost. And we were running timed fartleks, anyway, so the official route didn\u2019t really matter. As it happened, I had turned right where everyone else turned left. So I was on my own.<\/p>\n Whatever.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDid I turn wrong somewhere?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cOh, you\u2019re really asking the wrong person!\u201d I said, not elaborating further on my wrong turns and improvised loops.<\/p>\n She took out the slip of paper with the running map on it. \u201cI don\u2019t even know where we are.”<\/p>\n \u201cHere,\u201d I said. “We can go this way and rejoin the warm down route, or we can go back that way.\u201d I pointed in the other direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI just want to take the shortest path,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWell that would be back that way. Let\u2019s go.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I ran behind the pack. Their red lights blinked reassuringly in the darkness as they pulled away. I\u2019d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3016,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3015\/revisions\/3016"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}