On getting lost

Anyone who knows me well is aware that I have a phenomenally awful sense of direction. I am not sure quite how it comes about, it's partly a kind of inattention (often I am just thinking about something else) but it's also a kind of inability to notice and remember landmarks; where some people have a bump of direction, I have a small black hole, it is like being bad with numbers or incapable of carrying a tune.

(I have such a bad sense of direction that often the only way I get un-lost is to go the opposite way from what I believe must be the right direction! It is a strange kind of double-think, like something from Alice Through the Looking-Glass.)

This is a comical affliction when it comes to running! I had a lovely long run this morning, it really was good (low humidity, strong and steady legs, and I think I may have finally shaken off my stress-fracture-related muscle problems, the sports massage stuff has properly taken effect), and yet it also must be said that one of the other best things about this run was that I did not actually get lost until about mile 8 of 9.3. Mercifully late in the game!

I know Central Park reasonably well, I run there often, I looked at our little map (reproduced below, with some rather Gatoradish blots in the middle), and yet as soon as I wasn't running with anyone else I went completely astray. I had left the bridle path, I was trying to avoid the 10K race taking place on the main road, and I ran on a little path alongside the road in a direction that I was convinced was taking me towards the upper loop--it was with an extremely familiar sinking feeling that I suddenly realized I was coming upon Engineer's Gate (East 90th St.) from the north, when I could have sworn I was still running north up the west side....



However there are a number of positive things about this too.

1. At team meetings, it makes me feel like a character in one of Enid Blyton's Mallory Towers stories, where all girls have one or two distinctive traits that are alluded to as shorthand instead of character development. My character as far as the running class goes is that I am fast and once I start I will go forever without stopping--only perhaps not in the right direction...

2. More practically, I now have a lovely device that directly counters the ill effects of this problem! It's not GPS technology, you still can't get a Jetsonesque wrist unit that's as good as what you might have in a car, also it would be embarrassing if it spoke to you out loud on the street and GPS is fallible in the park in any case (this morning I was making a fervent mental note that if I ever have to get a car & start driving--i.e. let's say I go and teach at UCLA or somewhere like that--I will be damned to the expense and will definitely get the best GPS device imaginable, but that I had better keep a backup atlas in the car also because if the technology went down I would be hopeless), but it's got a great little thing that goes on the shoe & is called a foot pod which pretty much solves my difficulty, because once I realize I'm lost I no longer have to somehow find my way back to the correct measured course and then guess where I should stop so as not to exceed the training plan--the device tells me pretty much exactly how far I have run! And on this occasion, I headed back round the bridle path again and then up north in vaguely the right direction and in a happy coincidence hit the right mileage at the spot in the north-west corner of the park that's my preferred stop-start point. (The foot pod data is not 100% accurate, but it's quite good because you calibrate it on a measured track and give it an adjustment factor that takes your stride length into account.)

3. A wholly eleemosynary thing I also love about the device: the term "foot pod." It's irresistible! I tried to pin down what I found so funny about it, and realized that it reminded me of something from one of the Chronicles of Narnia, books that I read so often as a small child that they are pretty much engraved in the wrinkles of my brain. The Dufflepuds and the Monopods...