A twelve-miler that would have ended in a search party ten years ago

Well, probably not a search party, but a decent amount of frustration and embarrassment in my head to complement the scratches and scrapes on my legs.

In running, as in other realms, technology moves in apparent small jumps that, summed together, amount to major leaps in how we do things. Until I stop to consider the differences between running in the 1980s when I got started and running in the age of untold numbers of gadgets and add-ons, I think that my experiences now are the same as they were when I was 15 (and I'm probably about as fast, but on the wrong end of the bell performance curve now). In fact, the complexion of even a typical training run is incalculably different from what it was during the Reagan administration.

I have explained -- okay, boasted, sometimes -- that when I was in high school in the mid- to late 1980s, long before Garmins or any sort of non-scrambled GPS signal and long, long before smartphones, I had creative ways of measuring runs that couldn't be driven with a motor vehicle or a bicycle fitted with one of the then-state-of-the-art digital devices for keeping track of speed and distance. Many of the trails I ran on back then in Concord and Canterbury, N.H. were included on my grandfather's USGS topographical maps (he worked for the N.H. Fish & Game Department for most of his adult life) as dotted lines, so when I would run on these, I would take a length of soldering wire, bend it along the trail on the map, straighten it out, and hold it against the scale of miles to get a solid distance estimate. Hey, that was pretty resourceful back in the day. (This was about a dozen years before I developed Komenometry, which I will describe in due time.)


I have a Garmin but never use it because frankly I would almost rather not know how far I have run on any given outing. I am for an hour or so and call it whatever I think it is, as I am not likely to be off my more than a half-mile either way. And at the moment, I am not a candidate for being audited by the Internal Running Service, so my training log, which exists only in my head anyway, is not going to get me in trouble if I happen to have incidentally padded my mileage by a few percentage points.

I do, however, usually run with my Android. I like to listen to music or the occasional podcast when I run by myself, and when I am traveling, as now, I like to take pictures of random interesting things. But it comes in handy when I don't know exactly where I am because of the Google Maps feature. Like anyone else, I can find out exactly where I am to within a few precious meters and even watch myself move in the form of a blue dot. When I am traipsing along a road or well-marked or familiar path, there is no need for this. But when I start feeling like exploring, as I did on Wednesday afternoon, the GPS technology comes in very handy.

I'll start by noting that I am in some sense training at the moment, with a fairly firm and not proximate goal in mind, but that I am not yet training seriously enough to plan very far ahead. So on Wednesday, I decided I would do a "long" run, meaning an hour and a half or more, and that I would leaven the experience by exploring a few of the trails and abandoned, gated roads of Templeton, Massachusetts.

At some point in my first twenty minutes of this run, I earned my first tick of the year. I found the little bastards at the top of my quarter-sock after clumsily skirting the edge of a 50- or 60-meter-long lake at the nadir of a valley on what used to be Skunks Misery Road and is now, I would bet, a three-season bog. I knew that it made more sense for me to thrash gamely through the reeds than turn back...it always does, given the right perspective.

I scurried and scampered and slogged up and down a bunch of hills -- they're endless in these small towns in northern Worcester County -- until I had been running for about 38 minutes, at which point I found myself outside a Dunkin' Donuts. I stopped, got a drink, took some photos, uploaded them to Facebook, winced at what a fucking weenie I was at that exact moment, and headed back in the general direction of the Nikki Besse Plantation.

My legs -- I mean the skin, not what is left of the muscles underneath -- were already visibly worse for the wear thanks to by heroic battle with some tallish grass near the beginning of this run. But it was going to get worse. See, I knew I could get to a rail trail if I was willing to either cross a bridge over Route 2 and double back or hack my way through the woods behind an oddly placed furniture store. (In a town of 8,013 people, roughly 8,000 of whom have yet to show themselves during my stay here, every place of business seems oddly placed.) I thought that Google Maps' satellite imagery was indicating that a narrow trail would connect me from Baldwinville Road to the rail trail in question, but as it happened, it was a stone wall, running down a steep hill and featuring lots of water and mud on either side. This is where GPS technology both misled me and kept me on course; I was swearing and weaving my way through the thicket in what the faithful blue dot told me was the right direction, but the map had also done an excellent job of allowing a stone wall that is probably two hundred or more years old to imitate a path from on high.

I paused to consider the fact that without this phone, I wouldn't have been able to tell the fastest way to get out of those woods -- there was no sound save for the occasional distant vehicle on Route 2, and no distinctive terrain features. The setting sun indicated what direction was west-southwest, but this was of little help because I knew I didn't want to go that way anyway. At the same time, without my damn phone on me, I wouldn't have been blundering along though the woods in the first place.

In the end, I was gone for about two and a half hours and wound up running for about 95 minutes, which I will, with neither proof nor apology, claim was about 12 miles. I'm sure this hasn't been the least but fascinating (the next post won't be a letdown if drama is what you're after), but welcome to runner-blogs and their tedium. It's been a fun way for me to reflect on the many, many things I did out there, for better or for worse, that were not even an option 30, 20 or just 10 years ago.