Lost in The woodsy Woodlands

Today was one of the more interesting training runs that I have had in all my years of running. The plan was simple enough; I was going to run about 10 miles with a combination of concrete and trails this morning to make up for my running a 5k yesterday morning instead of my long run. I made sure my Garmin was fully charged last night after having the battery die in the last 1/4 mile of yesterday's 5k. Only problem was that I left it at home today. Turned out to not be a problem as Karen and Sara both had Garmins with them.

We met at 6am at Forestgate Park to run a little over 2 miles on road to the entrance of the George Mitchell Preserve trails on Flintridge in Indian Springs. Our plan was to take the trail to the new Creekside village. I ran the Trail Loop earlier in the week so was familar with that part of the trail. Our first attempt to Creekside was taking the Bedias lake trail off of the Trail Loop. That took us to Bedias lake but didn't seem to go any farther. We then backtracked on the Trail Loop to the Wetlands signpost and headed in that direction. There did not appear to be any trail to follow so we just ran on soft dirt which appeared to be have been wet not long ago. The dirt soon gave way to grass and we continued for awhile before determining that there was no trail. At that point we weren't sure which way to get back to the Trail Loop. After attempting to follow a dried up creek a few times and winding up in the same spot every time (they can't have that many cracked green buckets in the woods) we attempted heading east (in the direction of the sun). The brush was too heavy to continue in that direction; after giving that up and heading towards more open ground we found the cracked green bucket again. We then headed north and found a larger creek; we followed that creek quite aways through brush until we made our way to Bedias lake after about 2 hours of wandering off trail.

It turned out to be a nice shaded experience; more of an adenture run than a long run but you gotta take what is given to you sometimes. I'm sure we will find the trail that we were looking for someday.