adventure run

...The newly dubbed outing in which your smarmy host our charming hero uses his impeccable sense of indirection to lose himself in the knotted cobwebs that are the local [sub]urban streetsystems.

The endeavor invariably carries him nearly twice as far as he would like to run -- this particular adventure run ending, (after thirteen and one-half miles at a steady clip,) in a feeble finish where the early darkness had sent home all of the sideline spectators except the neatly raked piles of leaves, their rustles and whispers of "what happened to him?" just audible to our spent wanderer.