Last Thanksgiving's Mistake

No, my mistake was not eating to much food, or even eating at all. The mistake occurred before our Thanksgiving meal (in Peru). Having the day off from work, I decided to go on a long run. I usually went on long runs on Sunday since we normally got them off. Anytime I go running I don't like to just stick to the main road, I like to explore my surroundings. Well there are many dirt roads off the main road that just go for kilometers and kilometers. Upon going on them, there will be small villages that just pop up along the dirt road, but the road will keep going for who knows how long. I had run on several of these roads, and never found an end. Well on Thanksgiving, I decided to go on this one road (that I had been on before) not far from the house, that appeared to loop around and possibly come back to the main road. In training I had worked up to around 2 hours, so I planned to run about that time again. At first I started running main road but then turned off to this dirt road. Well I got to the place where the road made almost a complete U turn after an hour, and headed in the direction of the main road. But as I kept going, so did the road. I assumed that just around the next corner, it might connect back to the main road. For a time I believe the road was parallel to the main road. Though it is kind of hard to say, when you are just judging by the sense of direction that you are going and have never seen a map with any of these roads. Well about the 2 hour mark, the road split at a village, and I took the road that I thought that was in the direction of the main road. That one kinda sorta ended at another village. So I went back and tried to ask some locals in my broken Spanish where the other road went. They said it was 5 kilometers to another village. The way back to the main road was the way that I had come. Well I decided to try to go down the other for a little bit, but knew after a short time that I needed to turn around and go all the way back. My mistake in assuming that the road would come back to the main road was going to mean I had a long ways to get back. By this time, I was at the 3 hour mark. It was getting later in the morning, so the temp. was raising. The other things was that I was running low on the water I was carrying. Before leaving on my run, I did not tell anyone where I was going, and only one person knew that I was going running. So there was not much hope of anyone coming and finding me. My longest run prior had been a little over 2 hours so I knew that if I continued running, I would quickly run out of water, and also have a risk of injury from over running. So I headed back, running as slow as possible for a few minuets and then walk a while. The other thing I did was ration my water. That was the one thing I did not want to run out of quickly. If I did, that could possibly lead to dehydration, and then maybe heat exhaustion. So about half way back, I decide that I really need to get back ASAP. Instead of going back to the main road, I then tied taking short cuts across fields. These "short cuts" took longer than I thought, which took me through cow fields and some woods. During one of the "short cuts" I found some mango trees and ate a few good ones. Finally I came out on to the road that goes along our property line. By this time I was long out of water and glad to know that I was close to home. I arrived back at the house after about 5 hours of being gone. In the preparation for the Thanksgiving meal most people didn't realize that I was gone. A couple asked where I had been. After that long run, I decided to always carry extra water and a few soles to pay for a taxi ride back if need be. That day I was thankful just to be back at the house and to have clean water to drink.