The Leg-by-Leg Navigation Method

This is a short placeholder story generated for the design demo. Replace it with a real interview.

Use it when

You train alone on trails and getting lost is the thing you worry about most. Most wrong turns aren't about bad maps. They happen when you keep running on autopilot past a junction.

Step 1: Carry three copies of the route

Social anxiety meant Isla trained alone. Then she lost the path in the Pentland Hills in fog and spent an hour finding it again. After that she set a rule: the route lives in three places. A GPX file on her watch. Offline maps on her phone. A paper map in a zip bag.

Step 2: Split the route into legs

Before each long run, Isla broke the route into legs of 30 to 60 minutes. Each leg ended at something she could name: a bridge, a cairn, a gate. She wrote them on a card with expected times. "Leg 3: reservoir to the stone wall, 40 minutes." A 30K route became six small problems instead of one big one.

Step 3: Stop at every junction

This was the hard habit. At every fork, she stopped, checked the watch arrow, checked the map, and only then moved. It costs 15 seconds each time. In her first month she caught four wrong turns in the first 100 metres instead of the first 2K.

Step 4: Use the 10-minute rule

If a landmark hadn't appeared 10 minutes after the card said it would, she turned around and went back to the last one she'd seen. No pushing on to see what happened. She used it twice in training and both times was back on route in under 20 minutes.

She ran a 55K hill ultra the next spring with no wrong turns. She now helps run the navigation night at a local club.

Try it this week

Pick a trail route you don't know well. Split it into legs on a card with landmarks and times. Run it, stop at every junction, and log any time you used the 10-minute rule.