I got lost in the middle of a lake today while I was out running. (If you have never done it before, then be sure to read the FAQ about Lake Running first!) You would think that it would be pretty difficult to get lost in the middle of a lake. After all, there are no hills you can see for miles because everything is exactly level, and there are even a few islands to use as landmarks that you can run around.

Photo by ezioman
Yet there I was, having done a loop and on my way back, trying to figure out exactly where it was that I had come onto the lake. I could have easily backtracked and found where my footprints in the snow were, but there’s the possibility that snowmobiles had obliterated some and besides, where’s the fun in that?

I have a very good sense of direction, so I pointed myself towards where I wanted to go and it wound up being right.

After a few steps, though, I decided to give the map functionality on my new watch a try. It is a Garmin ForeRunner 305. I haven’t had it long, so I don’t know all of the cool things you can do with it yet. I mostly use it for mapping my runs after the fact.

It turns out that I was going in the right direction and would soon have gotten to a spot of open water that I would have remembered running around on the ice. It makes me very comfortable knowing that the map was there, though, because now I can run trails wherever I want and at least have an idea of what direction I need to go to get home. Once I was back on the path I wanted to take, it even started to warn me about 15-30 feet before every turn that a turn was coming. That was pretty neat, but also a little annoying.

Photo #59 by Don Penta
The run itself was a lot of fun. I ran 15 miles on snowmobile trails, with about a third of that on the surface of the lake. Anytime a snowmobile came near me I had to jump off to the side, where I would sink into knee deep snow. I also got some strange looks when they got close enough to realize I wasn’t wearing a shirt. Hey, it was hot out! It was at least 35 degrees.

Speaking of running without a shirt, the pictures for last week’s Resolution Run are now available. By the time it started snowing during that run, I had stripped down to just my singlet. You can see all of the pictures from the run (the photo to the left is cropped from #59) over at the Maine Running Photos website.