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Cranham to Ebley Mill. Kinda. In a roundabout sort of way. Edward Collier - June 2010

Sport is a cruel and unflinching mirror, as the eleven or so hapless England millionaires and their much poorer (apart from Mick Jagger) travelling fans would attest. " Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." I was that haughty spirit, as I pooh-poohed suggestions that I should reconnoitre my route prior to taking the virtual baton.

My appointment with hubris arose because I'd run the Cotswold Way Relay once before, when I ran the same leg (though it started in Catbrain Quarry - what a delightful name). This was a few years ago, and that year the fog was so thick all the way that what had been sold to me as a route of unparalleled visual charm to offset the pain of competition turned out to be like running through sock soup. But I didn't get lost - no sirree, not at any point. So on Saturday I figured - if I can run the thing and not get lost in fog, how likely was it that I could get lost on one of the clearest days in living memory?

Very likely, as it turned out.

More to the point, as I and seventy or so others lined up at the start - how likely was it that we'd be so strung out that I wouldn't be able to follow the person in front (given, and it is a given, that I wouldn't at any point be in the lead)?

Very unlikely, as it turned out.

How likely was it that the person I was following at any one time was lost?

I think you probably know where I'm going with this. Somewhere past half way, the route plunged into Randwick Woods and having at this point made pretty good progress (I estimate that I was about fifteenth) I was having a fine duel with a girl from Wye Valley. When we emerged from the woods she was about ten yards ahead of me but I did notice that I couldn't any longer see anyone in front of her. About ten yards behind me was a runner from Team Bath. We ran along the road. I wondered if we should be on the road. The girl ahead ploughed on. I glanced back and noticed that Team Bath had either dropped back or gone another way. When I turned back I noticed that Wye Girl had stopped and was shrugging her shoulders at me in the universal gesture that means "Where in tarnation are we?" I saw some walkers and asked them if they knew where the Cotswold Way had gone. Turned out they did - they even had a map.

It was here that panic and adrenaline supplanted common sense. Instead of taking a few moments to try to read the map properly, I took a wild and, as it turned out, wildly inaccurate guess at what the map meant, and headed off in completely the wrong direction. Wye Girl, poor sap, followed suit.

We weren't out of the woods metaphorically, but we were out of the woods in real life, because I could see Stroud in the distance. There were also plenty of footpaths to choose from, and quite a few people to ask, none of whom looked as if they'd even heard of The Cotswold Way, a suspicion that turned out to be true on examination. Muggins decided in any case that two arguments should take precedence - a) Stroud is more or less where Ebley Mill is located, and b) Stroud was downhill, whereas trying to find the correct footpath itself was almost definitely uphill. Wye Girl didn't disagree, so off we went.

Our conversation was necessarily limited as I had my noise-reduction headphones in and couldn't hear much - they're designed to sit inside the ear canal and are a pain to take out and put in. If you're especially bored or finding going to sleep difficult ask me why I have to have those rather than ordinary iPod "buds".

We were still lost, and it was dawning on me that any time that I might have made up for the team by running fast was being frittered away in an ocean of indecision, to-ing-and fro-ing, stopping and starting. Wye Girl courageously decided to flag down a passing 4x4. " Can you make it quick - I'm in a hurry!" said the harassed yummy mummy inside. "Where's Ebley Mill?" I said. "Straight down this road, turn right at the bottom."

She was right, but it wasn't where we wanted to go. We came out in Cains Cross, near the start of the Stroud Half Marathon. The correct route actually comes into Ebley Mill from the other end, so we had to run all the way from Cains Cross to Wycliffe School, then back again on the canal towpath. At the end Wye Girl and I crossed the line at exactly the same time, just like Dick Beardsley And Inge Simonsen who shared the inaugural London Marathon title, having run so much of the race together. (Just like them? Who am I kidding!) For some reason she appears above me in the results. She was wearing a GPS thingummy and it said we'd run more than a mile further than we should have done.

I don't really mind except that I let the team down, although I'm pretty sure that even if I'd had a map I'd still have got lost. Still, it was a lovely day for it, and Eddie Munro was on hand at the finish to give us our t-shirts. He'd run the first leg and looked very cool too, though he'd finished some hours before. I decided that I didn't envy those whose leg was in the afternoon. The delightful Mounsor family gave the rather less than fragrant Duncan and I a lift back to town where I'd parked my car.

It's not as if this is the first time I've been lost in a relay race. At the J W Ultra I made the mistake of thinking Chris Midgley knew where he was going, a mistake that cost me - well, my pride, I suppose.

Next race is the Aerospace 5 in Bishop's Cleeve. I used to live in Bishop's Cleeve and I've done the race about four times. But who knows - I still might get lost. If I'm not back by, say, 8.30, then would someone please send out a search party. If there are any St Bernards to hand, I prefer Johnny Walker Black Label to brandy. Well, if you don't ask...