About one mile

Somewhere on the trail, I had begun to hear footsteps behind me. It had been a while since I'd joined the pack and I was very familiar with their calf muscles and the form of their stride. Even now as I write this, I can see the man in blue's back perfectly, the shape of his shoulders and the back of his head. But these foot steps were not his, and I became aware of the fact that my body was slowing down. The man in blue was drifting farther and farther ahead of me, I could see flashes of his jersey through the trees and then at the top of a peak, but I wasn't catching him. And now the footsteps behind me were getting louder. I turned around to see a man in his forties staggering up an embankment. I let him pass. His name was John and apparently he had been watching me like I was watching the man in blue. We made it to a gatorade stop in the middle of no where. I was getting tired and I didn't know where I was in the race. My legs felt weak, but not broken. Same with my spirit. I smiled at him and he gave me some encouragement. I enjoyed having someone there, someone in front of me. But I took off first without paying much attention. I think that I was debating whether to eat or not. That's probably the most foreign part of long distance running, the deciding to eat in the middle of a really long run. So there I was thinking about Gu and running the wrong way into woods that I wasn't familiar with. The gu may have saved me from worse, I stopped to choke it down, and John passed me. A couple minutes after I started to run in the wrong direction, he turned me around, saying something about a road down the way. We had only gone about 10 minutes down path before turning around. It was my fault that we went in that direction, me and my stupid brain.
By now, I had no idea what position I was in, where I was, how much longer, or whether or not I could continue at this pace. My legs began to shut down. I could feel my quads burning on the down hills, I no longer whipped around trees or jumped from rock to rock. The feeling of immortality was replaced by fear as I prayed to whoever would listen that I didn't break my neck on the way down the slopes. I dug deep to get up the hills, hoped I survived the going down, and thanked my lucky stars whenever I'd see what looked to be a pretty even surface. I've never felt anything more terrifying than the drop offs and nothing more reguvinating than that fire break. I splashed through muddy creek beds and got caught on hanging ivy. The man in blue had disappeared over a ridge long ago, and I hadn't seen John in a half a mile. I missed his back. I missed seeing anybody. At one point I just yelled out, I wanted to know that some body was out there, but nobody answered me. After getting lost, I became paranoid that it would happen again. I checked my watch, it was my only indicator of how far I might have gone. Some runners have those crazy garmin contraptions that tell them how far, how fast, and how long they've gone- everything except run the race for them. But mine just says, "yo girl, you've gone 2 hours and 40 minutes." I imagine that it's in a southern accent, but I can't be sure. For the next thirty minutes, I stumbled through the miles. Please, how far away is the picnic area? There was a man with a camera pointed at a plant in the distance, he looked at me with wide eyes. I looked derranged, with sweat and mud caked on my face. I asked him again and he responded with the least appreciated measure of distance on the face of the planet, "About 1 mile". Let it be known, America, tired runners hate hearing that something is one mile away, even if it is ACTUALLY one mile away and even more so if it isn't. The next group of people, our camping neighbors, told me the same thing-- about a mile away from the man with the camera. So somebody was lying and I was slowly deteriorating.