December 2022 Monthly Running Challenge

I had planned a nice long run adventure involving going up to the village on the mountain, along a trail above it and then back down another route from the end of the trail. All of the mountain behind us is very rocky and technical, but there are marked hiking routes and the one I intended on taking is one I've hiked in the past, in fact I'm pretty sure we even took my daughter (though I do remember constantly worrying she was going to fall off the edge).
So, I take my usual country road up to the village, only to find they're digging it up and my way was blocked by a digger, a huge hole and a dumper truck they were putting all the earth into. They stopped when they saw me, and directed me to squeeze round the outside of the dumper, pretty much through a tree. I was doing ok until the guy sitting up inside looked down and said "do you want me to get down and help you?" *kitten* that! I thought, grabbing the front wheel with my left hand and pulling myself up onto a rock to get by, scraping my inner thigh on a spiky branch as I did so.
Ok, back to business. Had a gel, power-hiked the last couple of steep hills to the village. I had plotted my route on Garmin so my watch was supposedly telling me where to go (will I ever learn?) but it told me to walk through the side of a house so I had to improvise a bit. This village is interesting, the upper part is alleyways with staircases that kind of go under houses and squeeze between them. Anyway, I eventually emerged on the road and crossed to the start of the trails.
After a couple of minutes I noticed movement ahead of me and soon caught up with a little dog that was wandering about. I thought it was lost first, then the way it kept walking but looking back at me made me wonder if it belonged to someone who was in trouble and it wanted me to follow it. Then I reached it and saw it had a big label tied to its harness explaining that it is old but not lost and takes a gentle morning stroll on the trail while it's mum runs up and down the mountain then collects it on the way home. Very cute!
So far so good. Then the rocky, technical singletrack started. I felt off-balance a couple of times going uphill, and was thinking (and getting depressed about) the fact that my balance is getting worse, despite working on it. That mindset may have had something to do with what was coming next. I passed an old, disused quarry, carried on along the trail and as it passed over a ridge and the world fell away in front of me I realised it was a very steep, very rocky almost vertical drop. Right next to me. Told myself to look ahead, not over the edge, and kept going until suddenly there was a sharp turn and I just froze. Loose stones, steep descent ahead and I couldn't work out whether that really was the right trail or not. Even though my watch said it was, and I couldn't see anywhere I might have gone wrong. Basically my quads and my brain both failed on me.
Apparently vertigo is something we do now. So I turned round. I can't believe I did that, but I did, I gave up and turned round. Even though that meant I would now have to find a way to get back down the trail that minutes earlier I had been thinking I was glad I was going up and not trying to come down. That's how scared I was. I actually had to come down the hardest part on my *kitten*.
Once I reached the quarry I took an access track back down to the road and followed that along to where the trail ended, then picked up my planned route back down to the coast. That part was ok, a couple on donkeys cheered me up a bit by calling out to me as I passed.