Ever get lost and end up running way further than you planned?

Went for a run to a friend's house, tried to take a "shortcut" back and ended up running for 2:28:32, I was in high school and had already ran a 5 mile run that day.

I love it when this happens!

3-4 years ago I flew into Oslo, Norway. Arrived at my accommodations after 24+ hours in transit from Canada early evening, and needed to get out for a run to burn off some of the excess energy.

Before heading out I consulted a map and plotted what looked like an entirely straightforward out and back run with no turns. Only a moron could get lost running that route.

Well, it was dark, overcast and rainy, and apparently there was one turn on the way out, and I missed it on the way back. By the time I realized I was off course I was WAY off course. When I stopped for directions I was in a completely different part of town than I thought. Apparently the dark messes with my normally pretty good sense of direction. :-)

The run was a little longer than planned - I think 8 miles instead of 5 - but it's not like I had anything else I needed to do (other than get caught up on sleep, and maybe eat), so it was just a nice opportunity to explore (sort of) a part of Oslo I might not otherwise have seen.

A friend of mine used to go to races together and also train together once or twice a week. Sometimes a friend of his would join us, who didn't like running on the track and didn't like time trials.

One time we ran a 2 mile time trial, with my friend and I coming in close together. His friend was about 1/2 a lap back. We cheered him in at the finish, he came back growling, cussing, jerking his arms and legs (his usual style), kept going past the finish, bounced off the wall at the end of the track (this was at UCLA), kept running around the track on the outside in reverse and disappeared off in the distance.

Later my friend said he saw his other friend still running around campus 3 hours later.

Lets Runner wrote:

Went for a run to a friend's house, tried to take a "shortcut" back and ended up running for 2:28:32, I was in high school and had already ran a 5 mile run that day.

Hahahah whoa thats pretty lost.

I used to go on out and back runs in the city for my long runs. They usually lasted anywhere from 90 minutes to a bit over 2 hours. On one run I decided to both deviate from my usual route and go a little longer (2:30-2:45). Ended up running for about 3:50. I never ran these runs all that fast, usually 7:00-7:30, nut I still must have ran for over 30 miles.

Yes, on an 18 milers on a new route (it was basically 3x a 6 mile route, w/ a little spur route to the parking). Made a wrong turn to go back to the car and ended up a little over 22 (and 18 was a pretty big stretch for me at the time)

I set out for about a 7 miler on a late June day just before the sun went down, in Souther Nevada where the temps were still way over 100. I was going to run 3.5 miles out into the desert, and back. I got running and listening to some Led Zeppelin and got into a zone and was feeling great. Well, I looked down at my GPS and had run 7.5 miles out and thought I knew were I was, but soon realized I didn't. Middle of the desert + 100 degree temps + no water + being lost = Kinda scary. Eventually (obviously) found my way back, but certainly got lost in the process and ran close to 17 miles and was extremely dehydrated. One of the scarier moments of my running life.

On a Friday evening in August 1975 I'd just checked into a youth hostel in Turku, Finland with two friends. We decided to go out for a short run, maybe five miles or so. Somehow I got separated from them. I can't recall how and went down a street I thought they'd taken expecting to catch them. I kept expecting to see them just ahead of me but never did. Eventually I decided I'd gone the wrong way and backtracked deciding I'd just head back to the hostel but never did come to anything that looked familiar.

So I just kept running up one street and down the other hoping to see the hostel again. This went on for about two hours when the two guys came running towards me. They'd been at the hostel for a while expecting me to turn up but finally went looking for me when I didn't.

Back at the hostel I showered and began feeling chilled. When I got into bed it got much worse and I was shaking like mad. Everyone in the place took the blankets from their bed and piled them on me and I was still chilled. I must have had a whopping fever. From there I don't remember anything more about the hostel. For all I know I died there and this is the afterlife.

I generally have good navigational skills on the road, but in the woods is a different story. My HS XC team had a tradition of warming up by running through woods generally not part of the course. One time before a regional meet, we went a little too deep and did probably close to a 6-7 mile warm-up over an hour of hopelessly trying to find a road or trail. Coach was pissed we disappeared for close to an hour.

I'm surprised by all the people getting lost on out-and-backs. You people are pretty dumb.

I get lost sometimes when I attempt to do a loop in an unfamiliar place. Usually it's because one of my square sides doesn't connect thru due to a stupid expressway or water body.

Twice.

First time, my head was just somewhere else. I planned to do a 10 mile out and back. But it wasn't until about 8 miles that I realized I had yet to start coming back . . .

Second, I was on vacation at some of my families house in Colorado. We were smack dab in the middle of a large neighborhood and I was just going for a short 3 mile run. But three miles is through a lot of neighborhood and it was one of those stupid developments where every house looks the same. I ended up running probably three extra miles before I finally stopped and sat on the curb to try and think of what to do. I was in middle school at the time, had no numbers memorized (Who needs to when they're in the cellphone, right?) and had no kind of address. I thought I was screwed until about 10 minutes later when I saw my parents car 2 houses down from where I was at. Thank goodness.

HRE wrote:

For all I know I died there and this is the afterlife.

If this is the afterlife and there is still letsrun.com on then we all must have gone to hell.

I get lost all the time, horrible sense of direction. The most memorable was in Australia. We were staying in Sydney (near Bondi Beach) and I was supposed to run about an hour and I thought I had a pretty good run mapped out. Well, somehow I took a wrong turn and by about 1:30 into the run finally broke down and asked directions from a cab driver. I told him I was on Bondi Beach (could have been Bondi Beach Drive) -- he looked at me and said, 'well bloke, you are truly lost, Bondi is 5K away, and you can't run that far now can you?' -- well, actually, I can ;-).

When I was in HS, I got turned around trying out some new trails in my hometown. I popped out of the woods and I was two towns away and had no idea where I was. I wound up running for about 3 hours. The best part was that the basketball team drove past me on their way to a game when I was just starting out, then drove past me on their way back. They all assumed I did runs like that all the time.

Chunky Charms wrote:

I'm surprised by all the people getting lost on out-and-backs. You people are pretty dumb.

I get lost sometimes

I know. Maybe if we weren't dumb we could have yelled out for directions. How about you get lost now?

Chunky Charms wrote: I'm surprised by all the people getting lost on out-and-backs. You people are pretty dumb.

Several years ago I went to visit my grandfather in Florida. He lived in a retirement community that was a sea of condos around a golf course.

I went out one morning to run 5 miles. I thought I was doing a loop around the golf course, buy I got thoroughly lost because there was, apparently, two golf courses. I was gone a little over two hours and was starting to panic because all the buildings looked the same, I had no water and it was about 95 degrees. I stopped to walk and a little old man asked if I was lost. I said yes and told him the address I was looking for. Instead of just giving me directions, he walked me back to grandfather's.

OP, why are you afraid of beards.

A couple years ago when I was on assignment in Zurich I thought it would be a nice 10 miles to run the 5 miles into downtown and back. Since my hotel was near the airport, and one of the few Swiss-German words I knew was Flughafen, I figured I run in which was fairly straight-forward and follow the airport signs back.

Things were going well until I realized I hadn't seen a Flughafen sign in a while, and I couldn't remember the name of the street the hotel was on (a typical long german name).

It was early and not many people were out and about in the neighborhood I ended up in, and those that were apparently weren't interesting in talking to a sweaty guy in English.

I saw a tram but had no change to jump on, so I ran parallel to the tram until the next main station. There was a much larger map, but I wasn't sure which direction I was pointing. Also problematic was I'd put a 20 Franc note in my shorts and the unmanned station didn't take anything bigger than a 10 in the change machine. None of the stores I ran by were open.

So I started running back down the tram line stopping every shelter to check the map and make sure I was headed in the right direction. I hit another major interchange and on that large map could see where my hotel was, but it was also unmanned with the same change issue.

I ran further down another tram line until I saw the regional train track and then I knew where I was, but I was on the wrong side, so I jumped a fence, did some cross-country across a field, a creek, and another fence.

By then I was within a mile of the hotel as the crow flew, so a few more interesting tangents later I made it back. I figure I ended up going about 17 miles.