Ah yes, Cross Country season is almost in full swing. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning, listening to people tell awful jokes and expand their egos on the warm-up line, and well, running. 

This past week was unofficial practice, meaning no punishments would be administered to people who decided not to attend. Some people showed up every day, others for a few days, but most of the team didn’t show up at all – which was expected. It’s a hard sell to get people to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and run, especially when they don’t have to. The people who did come were subjected to a relatively light week, with the hardest run being the Eastview route on Thursday.

As for our featured story this week, it’s a little nuts; unfortunately, it involves me. 

My running partner so far this year has been a rising sophomore by the name of Roman Hanson. I have a faster 5K time than him on paper, but that will likely change quickly once the season starts. He wanted to go on a five-mile (remember the distance) run starting from Creekwood Park, turning left onto Farrow Road and eventually doing a loop around Explorer Boulevard, before returning to Creekwood. Just before we left, Caleb Cooke decided to join us because he’d always wanted to do that route, but his house was too far away to make it a practical course. So, we started our run, and it seemed like almost any other run we had ever done before: start slowly, then speed up to a relatively expeditious pace after the first mile or so. 

After the third mile, concern began to arise within us. The only person who knew the route, Caleb, had already been gapped by the two of us and was nowhere in sight. We weren’t that concerned, though.

After the fourth mile, that concern started to mount. We were under the impression that we were only meant to do five miles, yet we were continuing on in what appeared to be a straight line with no turn in sight. However, we kept running.

After the fifth mile, we admitted that we were completely lost and stopped to look at Google Maps. We were fools! We had missed our turn. How silly of us. So, we turned around to rectify our blunder. Half a mile later, I noticed that some of the buildings we were running past looked a bit – familiar. I opened Google Maps again. We were further away from our destination. 

We had turned around before we got to our destination, thinking we had already passed it. I’ve never made such an egregious navigational error. Never. However, I do have a bunch of excuses I can pull out of my backside:

• I was going off faulty information. Roman’s phone calculated our route to be 5.2 miles. When we finished our fifth mile, we were nowhere near our destination. Hence, we thought we missed our turn.
• Explorer Boulevard is a rather monotonous road with very subtle turns – I didn’t know which cardinal direction we were going (Before you mention the sun, it was cloudy that day).
• Almost no traffic was on the road, so I couldn’t tell if the sidewalk we were on was with or against traffic. We based our turnaround decision on the direction arrows on Google Maps.
• We thought we had passed Columbia High School. We hadn’t.

By the time we finally made it back to Creekwood Park, a route that was meant to be five miles had ballooned to eight. Note that we also did the run on no warm-up on account of it being started too early.

I was meant to interview someone for this article, but that got thrown out the window after today’s error. My would-be interviewee, Conrado Jocson, called me once we finished our seventh mile. He asked me why I wasn’t back at Creekwood Park. Beleaguered and not yet understanding the scale of our incompetence, I just said, “Sorry, we got lost.”

He was not happy. He put off his Disc Golf game with his friend for about half an hour just to not give the interview.

In other news:

• I aggravated an old man by making a loud noise on Creekwood trail.
• Keving Harring did 55 miles of biking one day, then ran with us the next.

Yeah nothing notably newsworthy happened this week. Except for The Explorer Boulevard Incident of 2024, of course.