Roadtrip Running: Winding a Bit Off Course

Whoops — I Did it Again

I have an odd running habit. No, not the fact I enjoy doing it every day, har-har-har.

I seem to have a nack for getting lost on the runs I take in new locations.

Even what should be a simple out-and-back course.

Even when I’ve run that course a few times, even a few years in a row.

It happened again over Christmas break. My family and I were traveling to Nashville and stopped at the same spot near St. Louis we’ve hit before on day 1 of the two-day road trip there. When I first scouted out the area in summer 2021, I noticed a nice trail system near St. Peters and Cottleville.

On that first August morning run in ’21, an 8-miler, I strapped my Asics on as my family snored away in the dark hotel room and headed out to what I thought was a long, secluded trail system. But the path dropped out into neighborhood streets after just four tenths of a mile in the direction I chose. Rather than admit defeat, or turn around, I figured I’d run four miles out and four back. So I tried to keep the route as straight as I could, even as it transitioned from campus sidewalks to strip mall curbs to — for the final stretch — a crumbling shoulder on a busier and busier road.

But upon hitting the 4-mile mark, I turned around attempted to retrace my path. I’d made it most of the way into mile 8 and didn’t seem to be hitting the same streets, and that abbreviated trail didn’t materialize in the distance.

This was early in my training, so I was wilting in the heat and not really ready to extend the run beyond the target distance. I ended up walking a bit further, then headed back, then missed the turn again, and eventually, when I found the park trail I broke into a grateful final sprint to my car.

Meanwhile, my family was through breakfast, showered, and tapping their feet wondering when I’d rematerialize and get the show back on the road to Nashville.

Sheepishly, this scene has played out in the same hotel a couple times since. Last Thanksgiving, I missed the turn on the loop back, again, only ending up on a different trail in a different neighborhood. I used my Garmin watch to navigate back. (Something I’d learned while getting lost on an out-and-not-back run in Amsterdam in 2022 my first weekend with the watch.)

This Christmas, I picked up on missing the same turn when I was about four blocks beyond it, retraced my steps and ended the run short of my car, walking the rest of the way, returning to more eye rolls.

What can I say? I guess I’m a creature of bad habits. And the strip malls in Cottleville are a blur before me.

A Wayward Run is Still a Good Run

I guess I don’t mind getting lost a little. It’s how I’ve explored a lot of the neighborhoods I’ve moved into, starting from college.

In 1994-95, there weren’t any Google Maps or Map-My-Run apps. We still toted around AAA paper atlases whenever we headed out of town. And we measured new runs in the car, matching our mile markers to remembered landmarks because we were going to have to hit the lap button on our Timex Triathlon watches ourselves.

But that first year of college I had no car to map new runs. So I set off in different directions from my dorm room and made my best guess at mile markers based on what I figured was my pace. And if I got sidetracked into a less linear route along the way, that was just part of what made that run distinctive.

By the time I graduated from Carnegie Mellon I had maybe a dozen or so routes in distances from 3 miles to 18 winding up and down and around the hills of Pittsburgh. They took me to neighborhoods beyond Oakland I might never have discovered.

I take a similar approach whenever I am planning runs for towns I pass through on vacation or work trips. I mean, I could consult Google Maps ahead of time. But what would be the fun in that?

Granted, for reasons of safety, it does make sense to do more than divine a good way down the block away from your Air BNB or hotel. Having to record another 8-miler during my recent Christmas stay in Franklin, south of Nashville, I wanted to do more than a boring, out-and-back course, particularly with a scenic, historic downtown to run through. So I used the Garmin app’s create-a-route feature. Still — I tested my memory on the run and resisted the temptation to fire up the watch’s turn-by-turn navigation capabilities: too easy! The run was completed without incident. (And Christmas was saved!)

And I’ve had fun, preparing for races in new cities, mapping the race course on my Treadmill’s Google Maps Streetview and running it a few weeks or months in advance. And then the better courses end up in my collection for years afterward, like the half marathon around leafy Storm Lake, in Iowa, or the legendary Falmouth, Mass 7-miler.

But whether I’m just passing through, or hanging my hat in a new place for a week, like I do at our favorite vacation spot in Sunset Beach, NC, I want to leave some time for exploring on my runs. Maybe I miss a turn or two, or take a scenic detour down a bike path or close to the breaking surf. In the end it’s not the miles on the odometer or even how fast you get there, but the sites you remember from the road.