a day off like no other

celebrated my day off thursday with QUITE the adventure at malibu creek state park. originally slated to do a trial run of the upcoming 22k (14.5M) course, everything started out fine and dandy. ran thru the old M*A*S*H site on our way up the infamous bulldog motorway - 3.4M of fun, steep uphill.

vim at the M*A*S*H site

start of bulldog

made it to the top (6.5M) no worse for the wear, and even bumped into a fellow hiker taking a breather for accomplishing the same feat.

atop bulldog

last smiles for hours

but somewhere around mile 9, we veered off course and all went to hell. instead of heading E and staying on the mesa peak fire road, we ended up going S on corral canyon towards the PCH. we ended up in a tony residential district and saw the corral canyon street sign, much to our horror.

at this point, we were about 2M off course, with still a good 6M to go once we get back on track. we had run out of food and our water supply was nearing zero, so we hemmed and hawed about our dilemma - do we backtrack to the trail and push on for the remaining 8 miles? or do we keep going down corral canyon another 3 miles to get to the PCH and try to hitchhike back to malibu canyon road, then back up another 6 miles to the park entrance?

just then, an angel - and by angel i mean resident ed - was checking his mail, so we picked his brain on what to do. luckily, he's an avid mountain biker and knows the park trails like the back of his hand, so he happily offered to top off our water bottles and even threw in a couple of bananas. since he was heading back to work, he offered to drive us back to the mesa peak fire road, where we would go the remaining 6M back to the car. what a godsend.

a labyrinth!

a peek inside the caves

thankfully, the rest of the trail was predominantly downhill, but it was all a blur the last few miles. we ended up walking the last two on las virgenes - determined not to make any more errors on the trails - and finally made it back to the car. 18 miles and 2,500 burned calories later, we did it haha.

the cr-A-zee thing is, we have warrior dash this saturday, so i'll rest up today and go right back at it tomorrow...