Great noontime run. Not being familiar with the area, I looked at the mapmyrun website and found a little loop nearby. After about a half mile of running along a busy street and through a parking lot I found the path I was looking for. It was pretty narrow at the start and then opened up onto a dirt road that quickly dropped down into a little valley, which eventually led to a parking lot adjacent to a wilderness area. There was a dry creek right next to it and I ran along that for a ways, through a strand of trees and along the base of a steep brush covered hill. For a mile or so you could completely forget that you surrounded by freeways and big office buildings as you can't hear any traffic there or see anything except wild country. After running along a mostly flat section I saw a sign that said something like "Old Lopez Road". I decided that was probably the way back up and so I started running up that path. The trail started to climb and became fairly narrow in spots. It was quite an effort to keep going with the sun beating down. After a mile or so I was back up on top and running along a nice trail behind office buildings. When I got to what I thought was the end of that trail, I turned back into a parking lot and ran back along what I thought was the street leading back to my office. It wasn't. I kept running along the street hoping to catch sight of some kind of landmark. The further I ran, the less familiar everything looked. I finally stopped and asked someone for directions and he told me that the street I was looking for was in the opposite direction. Running that way I started to recognize some of the buildings and was soon back on familiar ground and found the way back to my building. You'd think that seeing Qualcomm on the side of a building would be a good landmark, but it turns out that there are thirty-eight buildings of various sizes with the Qualcomm name on them (they have twelve shuttle vans that are kept busy taking employees from one building to another). It's certainly a lot easier to get lost than I would have thought. It turned out to be quite a good run as I was still sweating a half hour after a cold shower. |