After USNCO, I came home, half-dead after surviving on minimal sleep and Dunkin Donuts coffee. The weather was stunningly beautiful—63 degrees, sunny with spots of clouds, slight breezes brushing by. Although I had told myself earlier this week that I would erg on the weekend, I decided to not waste this opportunity and go out for a run.
On Friday afternoon, I actually ventured off into East Rock, a slight extension of my normal 2.5-mile running loop. Since I was able to easily (albeit very lightly) jog the entire 3.5 mile loop, I felt confident enough to try to dig into East Rock even further. After all, running through the park was a surreal, eye-opening experience; it gave my perception of running a new shred of optimism after realizing how much better it was to run along a pond than next to traffic lights and cars.
Terrible idea. There were three major downfalls to my plan:
Built up fatigue—my underdeveloped calves hadn’t had the time to recover from the run the day before, since I had gotten 4 hours of sleep cramming for USNCO.
East Rock was an actual hiking course with huge uphills, instead of the short lake trail I had run through previously.
I did not know any geography of East Rock.
A few minutes in, I decided to walk the uphills of East Rock, hoping to start running again once I hit the summit and started going down. Pausing Strava, I walked up to the top of Whitney Peaks and took a picture of the view, feeling pretty proud at this point. Should I try to go to an even taller summit? my brain asked, but my legs said no; so I started descending the peak.
Except I couldn’t. There was no path down on the other side of the peak.
Stupid as I was, I forgot there was an option of backtracking my way up, and basically rock-climbed my way down the cliff and landed on… a pile of leaves. It wasn’t one of the trails. Damn. I looked back up at the cliff that I had just slid down from: there was no going back up. After pacing back and forth for a minute or so, I decided to SOS-call RY for help, the only person that I could think of who would know the trails of East Rock. Fortunately, he picked up, but rather not so fortunately, he could not figure out where I was, nor was he in New Haven.
20 minutes, 4 Strava map screenshots, and 2 photos later, I was stuck in an even bigger ditch. Smart as I was, I had thought that if I really needed to “go west” that badly (according to my useful guide), it would be optimal to step off the rails of the car road and slide down to a path underneath, which seemingly curved around the pond and led to a promising place west. It was actually much steeper than I thought, and I could feel the dirt fill up my shoes and socks as I trudged through feets of piled-up leaves and scratchy bushes. Now, I thought, this miraculous path would take me home.
Wow! A dead end!
The path was not a path. Looking up, I had a strange sense of déjà vu as I wistfully stared into the railing on top of the cliff. There was no way I could get back up there. At this point, I really started panicking. It was nearing 7pm, less than an hour to sunset, and I was still miles away from my house on top of a mountain. RY started talking about how he was reading creepy horror stories on the internet right before I called him, and I told him to shut up as he started hysterically [edit: according to him, not hysterically] laughing. I then looked at the Strava map to see myself stranded in the middle of no paths.
damn
I started going up another slope, trying to get back onto the car road, but then I found myself stuck in the middle of the thorniest bushes I had ever encountered in recent years. I really, really thought that there was a chance of dying right there. My guide very kindly said “death is just weakness leaving the body” then started talking about how he created such an inspirational quote. Ignoring him and hurt in despair, I waddled back down with scratches all over my legs and arms, telling myself that I wasn’t going to end up in a headline that said: “Non-athletic 16-year old climbs up a small mountain and dies alone.” Sighing, and after another few minutes of OTL, I trudged back onto the slope that I had come down on, dead leaves knee-high, more sets of bushes scratching every inch of bare skin, slipping down meters at a time with hands desperately snapping at tree branches and twigs.
In the end, yes, I did find myself back on the road. I still had no idea where I was, but at this point, I ditched all future plans of circling the park and started backtracking the way I came back from. Once I stepped into a clear dirt path again, I sighed in relief and started running. Half an hour until sundown! Thanking my guide for his huge help in navigating through East Rock and complimenting his knowledge on geography around there, I hung up and jogged all the way back home, arriving slightly before it started getting dark. To be fair, it was dangerously close to having to call 911 or scream until someone came over, so it was helpful knowing that someone would hear me die over the phone if I ended up falling off one of the steep hills or getting lost forever within the trees.
The moral lesson should be that I should never go up East Rock alone ever again. But I think I will in the future.