On Friday, my friend Matt Owen and I decided that we wanted to do a 5K in a town called Elberton. We were excited about it because it was at 9 o’clock at night and the prize for the winners and top three in the age groups was a piece of granite. Elberton is about 40 miles away from Athens so we left an hour before the race. Owen drove, and I was in charge of directions. It took us about 35 minutes to figure out that I was not meant to be the navigator on this trip. Early on in the trip we saw some signs that said we were heading toward Elberton. A while later I noticed that we didn’t see the signs anymore and the highway signs were not for 72, but for 29. So I started to think we might have gone the wrong way. I called home to Beth and she confirmed that not only did we go the wrong way, but we would never be able to cut over into the right direction and make it to the race on time. So a couple disappointed guys made their way home having wasted about an hour driving around for nothing.

I figured that since I didn’t make it to the 5K Friday night I would try to make it to the one on Saturday afternoon if I wasn’t too tired from morning practice. Beth decided that she would come to this one with me. Neither of us had ever been to Watkinsville, where the race was held. We decided that we would write out the directions to be extra certain we could find this one. Unfortunately directions don’t do much good when the streets aren’t labeled. This was very frustrating. Eventually, as we were running out of time I stopped at a gas station and asked where the race was. She told me the host high school was just a mile down the road. I raced down the road and quickly figured out that she meant for me to go the other direction on that road. We were not happy and didn’t have time to turn around and make it to the race.

Of all the 5K races I’ve done in the past couple months I never got lost once. Now within two days I was lost twice and missed both races. I think I’m going to try to race again next week. Something must have been telling me that I needed the rest this weekend for a great week of training this week.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 7:24 pm and is filed under robertmargalis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.