Here's one I don't like thinking about, but it happened.
Probably was about a sophomore in college. Although I'd made the varsity XC as a freshman, I ended up quitting the team after the first season to just run on my own. (Which is a separate story.)
As long as I wasn't competing anymore, I backed off the intervals and red-line hard runs and got into running more LSD, long slow distance. Always looked forward to the weekly or biweekly 12 or 14-miler or longer. Living in a small town with lots of dirt roads surrounding, and running LSD and covering a bit of ground, I looked forward to coming up with new routes and roads to run on. Usually I'd scout them out ahead of time just to make sure I wouldn't run into any problems.
Also, because of the dog problem in rural areas, I'd learned a trick from some magazine article around that time for fending them off. You buy some nice lightweight lamp-hanging chain and make a belt out of it with a clip on the end. Whenever I would run dirt roads out in the country that had dogs on them, I'd clip on my "belt" before taking off. Worked great, too. Any dogs come at you, all you had to do was unclip the chain and let it dangle and jingle or maybe swing it around a time or two, and just the menacing sound of that chain was often enough by itself for them to turn tail and beat it.
Before I learned about this, I'd gotten bit once by a pack of about three friendly farm collies who came charging out from a house by the side of the dirt road, and one nipped me in the stomach being playful not really knowing what it was doing. The thing with dogs is you can never be quite sure whether they're friendly or not till it's too late to react. Even if they *are* friendly they can still bite you. So I became more proactive about scaring the dogs off ahead of time and not waiting till they got too close.
Well, one day, I decide to run a new 14-mile route out on some dirt roads I'd never been to before, but made the mistake of not scouting it out ahead of time, or didn't have time to do it or something. And I didn't take my chain with me either, or just forgot.
So I'm a little past halfway and not feeling my best on this run for some reason, getting fatigued earlier than normal. As I'm running past a cluster of houses on a dirt road, about 3-4 dogs light out after me from one of the houses, coming on fast. Since I didn't have my chain with me, I reached down and picked up a couple of rocks off the dirt/gravel road and threw at them to fend them off.
Well, the owner sees me throwing rocks at his dogs (didn't hit actually them, although I wouldn't have minded), and gets royally po'ed. He grabs his wife and young kid, jumps in his pickup truck and comes barrelling after me down the dirt road.
I start to panic wondering what to do. There is a big open field just off the road in the general direction I am heading that I could have cut across, except it is newly plowed, and it would have been very tough going. Plus I am more tired than usual today--didn't have a good head of steam. And then I also notice as the guy is coming past me in his pickup that it has a gun rack and a gun hanging from it in the back window. Don't want to try outrunning a gun.
With my escape cut off, this macho guy slams the brakes on when he gets about 20-30 yards past me, skids to a stop, jumps out of his pickup and blocks my path making a big show for his wife and kid. He bellows at me what I am doing throwing rocks at his dogs.
Skinny weak upper-body runner that I am, I just try to say something contrite, but he doesn't care and whacks me across the side of the head with his hand once or twice. I am reduced to apologizing even though I am extremely angry and furious at this asshole who can't control his dogs going after someone saying they'd "be all right" (yeah, right), but can't really do anything about it. Once he's blown off his steam he says never to run by his place again, stomps back to his pickup, and drives the short 100-200m back to his house.
Shaken and shaking and angry as I was, I continued on my run--but couldn't help wondering what his wife and kid thought about his whupping up on some defenseless skinny runner like me. I remember thinking if I were them I would have been pretty embarrassed to be seen with him during that kind of tantrum.