Parenting fail last night.
Background:
My daughter has swim practice Tuesday and Thursday nights. She heads inside the pool room at 6:55 and meets me in the waiting area at about 8:05-8:10. Normally I bring work with me to do, but then end up screwing around on my phone the whole time.
Yesterday I decided that I'd use that time more efficiently - as soon as she went inside, I'd go for a run. I knew there were sidewalks running down the major street, so even though I wasn't familiar with the area (it's about 15 miles away from where I live), I expected that an out-and-back run would be no problem.
The events:
Everything started out as planned, I drove my daughter there, already in my running stuff. I dropped her off and started my run. This is point A on the map below. At about 2 miles, the main road veered off, but it continued to be sidewalk/paved trail, so it was no problem. At about 3.5 miles, I turned around - this is point B. Everything is going exactly as planned - I'd get 7 miles in and be back with time to spare.
At just past mile 5, I faced a problem - there were a series of roundabouts with streets shooting off at various angles. (This is the blue circle area.) And I couldn't determine which way I was supposed to go. Obviously I screwed up, initially heading due south when I should have gone east. After about a quarter mile, I realized I screwed up, and I backtracked back to the blue circle. But instead of going east, I went southeast.
At this point, I started getting really nervous that I was going to be late meeting my daughter. And things were not looking familiar to me. I didn't have my phone with me (because I am dumb), but I did have $10. I started waving at cars passing by, hoping that I could offer $10 for a ride back to the swimming pool, but no one stopped. Finally, I remembered that my running watch has a navigation feature where it will point you towards the starting point. So I turned that on. When I was between points C and D, it told me that I had about 1.6 miles left to go, in a general north east direction. But the problem was that the watch was pointing the direction as the crow flies; there were no roads actually going in that direction.
At mile 7 (point D), I knew I was screwed. It was almost time to pick up my daughter, and best case scenario was that I was still about 1.5 miles away as the crow flies, with no idea how to actually get there. At this point, I saw a police car driving towards me and I started waving frantically. Thankfully, the cop pulled over and I tried to explain my predicament - I was lost, I was late to meet my daughter, and I desperately needed a ride. She told me that she couldn't give me a ride because she was the only car on duty, but she did give me directions back.
So I started running again, this time much faster. It turned out that the ~1.5 mile distance was really 2.4 miles by foot.
When I got there, my daughter was standing outside with her swim coach. She had, with the coach's phone, just texted my wife to say that I wasn't there. So there was about 1-2 minutes of panic for my wife, who apparently thought that I had been hit by a car while running, but the coach quickly texted her back to say I had made it.
Good times.