Wildest Training Run Encounter

I have been laughing my butt off the last hour reading these. My vote goes to ex-coach. I have a couple to add along some similar themes.

(1) I was not actually running when this happened but I was trying to go..... my wife and I are in Ft Wayne, IN visiting friends and I drive over to the river trail park in town to do an evening run. I pull up in a parking lot with a few other cars around and get out to put my shoes on. A guy in the car next to me says hello. He seems normal. But then I suddenly get this AWFUL feeling that I AM the center of attention of every person in the parking lot. As I look around without being obvious, I confirm this has to be a gay hang-out and decide it might not be a good idea to run here alone in the dark. I don't feel threatened but I am definitely drawing too much attention for my comfort level.

BUT it does not end there..... I get in my car and drive to another parking lot in the park with no other cars around and not more than 5 sec after I pull in, some guy in a truck pulls up about 3 spots down and is trying to make eye contact and motions to me big-time. This FREAKS me out so I drive across town and finally find a junior high track with kids practicing football in the center and a few moms walking around the track to do my run on. When I get back to our friend's house later, I get told the park is a huge gay hang-out with some recent crime problems. OUCH.

(2) I am running in a Pinckney, MI state park along an 18 mile trail with some buddies when I cut off to take a short cut I have never run before. I start to get REAL TIRED and begin to feel lost as I round a bend in the trail. Suddenly, two hunters about 50 yds away jump up and fire their guns at some geese on a lake about 20 yds to my right. I jump in the air and then trip and fall due to the gun noise and then nearly $hit myself. Needless to say, I had fresh legs and did not feel lost the rest of the way to my car.

bump

Bump this up some more...i want to see some more good encounters...

Miami Book Festival, Nov. 1997 or so. It was the end of the day Sunday and I had that major Jones for a run. So I had my stuff with me, and leave things in the rental car. Wearing those short runner shorts and an Oregon track T-shirt someone gave to me, I head through a seedy neighborhood called Little Brazil, which is a very sketchy area. Continuing on, everything gets worse and worse. I guess I ran for 40 minutes, and by now, I'm getting nervous, very dirty looks, seeing lots of gang, prostitution, drug, illegal activity and what-not. Another day at the office in a Miami ghetto.

Had to go back. Must have run 5:20s for the last six miles as it was getting dark. Made it back and thanked my lucky stars it wasn't worse.

The dingo ate your baby.

One time I was leading the race and a fan told the guy to make a move because I was dying out. I said "no I'm not." All the fan said was "oh," and I went on to win.

This isn't a running story, but I figured you guys and gals would appreciate it anyway. Also, it will bump this thread back up to a prominent spot!

For Halloween one year, me and my tech-geek pyro friends decided to make a timed rocket armed with C4. We set the timer for 12 midnight, hid it in the woods next to a large soccer field, and went trick or treating. We timed our return so that we would be walking past the field when it went off.

We walked by just in time to see the rocket explode out of the woods and dive-bomb into the field. (For some reason, we set the trajectory very low.) A couple seconds after it hit the ground, the C4 exploded, making a ridiculously loud boom that echoed around the entire neighborhood. We thought this was pretty cool, but we didn't want to get in trouble, so we ran to my friends house.

The next day, in school, everyone was talking about it. Apparantly, a bunch of dudes were smoking up in the woods almost on top of where we had set up the rocket, and when it went off, it randomly came flying out of the bushes at them (it was well-hidden, of course) and it nearly decapitated one of them. Also, there was a couple making out on a blanket in the field when out of nowhere, they heard and saw a rocket blazing out of the sky, straight for them. Luckily, the rocket dive-bombed into the ground, but it still came dangerously close to where they were set up. The field had a sizable hole in it, and the grass was totally burned out for about an 8-foot radius.

My friends and I will always remember the night we almost blew up all of the stoners! It was awesome.

Keep the stories coming! They're hilarious. I still like the original post the best!

I hope your story is BS. First, where did you get C4? Second, if you had hurt someone, you would go to prison for a very long time, deservedly so too. Did you hear about the kid in Pennsylvania. He was walking home from a friends house one night last winter. As he crossed a bridge over the turnpike, without thinking, he threw an ice ball or rock over the side at a car passing below. It shattered the windshield and killed a woman right in front of her husband and kids. Now he is in jail - which is where you and your friend should spend some time reflecting on what you did, if in fact you are not BSing.

No BS! I grew up in a wealthy suburb, and the psychotic older kids (the toublemakers that were kicked out for bomb threats and such) would sell you anything they could get their hands on (which was pretty much anything) if the price was right.

About the danger- we didn't anticipate the rocket divebombing into the ground like it did, we wanted it to shoot into the air, explode, and softly fall back to earth. We also didn't consider the fact that people might be in the woods or on the field. Additionally, none of us had used C4 before, so we had no idea the explosion would be so intense. It was youthful ignorance, but it was certainly hilarious! I bet none of those stoners toke up in the woods at night without worrying about rocket bombs coming out of nowhere to kill them.

duane allman2 wrote:

Attacked by a coyote while on the morning 10-miler was aboiut the only weird thing that has happened....haven't been the same since the rabies shots

Very similar. I was running down a country road and a pack of wild dogs started chasing me. They chased me for about 200 meters and I thought that I was a dead man, but just then a farmer came up on a four wheeler and gave me a lift to safety.

Was running on a muddy trail a few summers ago, when a pack of dogs come flying towards me. In tow was a teenage kid on a sled.

I call BS on moriarty.

But I'll give you a chance to prove yourself. How did you detonate the C4?

Awesome stories, and I have plenty, but I'll just give the most recent (who doesn't have tons when you're on high school and college teams):

Well, I had just moved into some new apartments in a not so great neighborhood near downtown Houston and the best running spot is this huge cememtary. Sometimes the gate to the cemetary is open, but I soon found out that sometimes it's not.

So, whenever the gate is closed, I follow the feeder road next to the highway and run down a narrow path (about the length of how far you can extend your arms) through all this brush and trees as the highway goes up a bridge to go over a bayou/canal and then I can sneak onto the graveyard by running on the canal bank.

Anyway, one day the gate was closed and I had to go down my beaten path. I head down, run my 5K loops, no problem, and head back to the path. It's a blind left turn with all the trees/foliage and remember it's a very tight space (think between cars at a shopping mall). Well, I hit the turn (at 6:00 pace no less) and they're this fully clothed Mexican male is laying on the ground, so I got to step over him, saying, "sorry, sorry, excuse me" but right next to him standing is this completely naked hispanic girl. I mean, I am right on top of these two, trying to get by... she's completely naked, he's completely shocked, I'm half naked (no shirt) and sweaty and there is no room to maneuver. All I can say is, "perdoname, excuse me" and a big last "sorry" as I sprint away.

It was hillarious and embarassing, but one of my best memories of a training run. Haven't seen them since in what they thought was their private love corner...

I was running in a border town in Texas, and was already quite nervous about being alone out there. As I made it around a thich mass of cactus and brush I ran straight into a herd of...creatures. I am not sure what they were. They looked like a cross between an emu and a buzzard. All that I knew for sure was that they were as tall as me and that I was outnumbered. I turned and ran like hell and confined my future runs to the small but creature-free golf course.

On a more disgusting note, I was in San Antonio and was doing strides on a field behind an apartment complex. As I made my way back to the straight, I nearly ran into a man with his pants at his ankles jerking off. The strange thing was that he looked so proud. This girl was not impressed, but seriously freaked out.

Plastic explosive story.

I worked in a summer camp for boy scouts one summer and they had a rifle range there for the kids to play with their .22s.

There was one cocky snot nosed little brat who bragged all the time about what a great shot he was and how cool his rife was blah blah blah. Well one of the scout masters there was a civil engineer and he was lisenced to use explosives to blow up dangerous beaver dams and such. He challenged the kid to a shooting contest and put a dime sized gob of explosive behind the bullseye on the kids target. Of course the kid hits it first shot and the wooden target disintegrates in a cloud of smoke. Kid nearly pissed his pants.

I think Moriarty is full of crap though.

Great stories.

Back in college, I was doing my post-organic lab late night run, around midnight. I ran through a rich neighborhood near my college. As I passed one house, I heard a commotion. I stopped to hear what was happening, and I slowly realized that I had stumbled upon a breaking and entering in progress. The burgler, who was very large, realized simultaneously that his breaking and entering had been stumbled upon. He, being much larger than I, gave chase. I've no doubt I would have beat him over the course of 3 miles but this man was a strong half miler and may have been gaining on me as I neared the college. Fortunately I spotted a public safety officer on patrol. I sprinted toward him, sputtering, "burgler". The burgler, who again was quite large, probably larger than both me and the public safety officer combined, wasn't phased. He continued toward us. Officer radioed for backup and a huge ex-marine public safety officer comes charging out on bike, just like a cavalry charge. It was a Kodak moment. Burgler does quick 180 and takes off. They never caught him.

Touchy-feely, feel-good runner story: when I was teaching English in Turkey, I would ignore the hazards to my health from cars and pollution and train in the streets of Istanbul. Once, as I was running up a very steep hill in the city, I saw an older street vendor struggling to push his fruit cart up the hill. Thousands of people were passing, including cars which were almost knocking his cart down, but no one was helping. He came to a standstill and the cart started to roll back down on top of him. I handily jumped to his aid and together we pushed the cart up the heel. A crowning moment in US-Turkish relations.

On an early evening training run last fall, these guys drive by me and some of my teamates and throw an egg at us from their car. It missed, but I yelled at them "Go to Hell!". I look back a second later and the bastards are pulling a quick U-turn. They come back toward us and nail me in the leg with an egg. With egg all over my shoes and leg, I was pretty pissed off.

Just got back from my lunchtime run in downtown San Francisco. Saw half a dozen firefighters chasing a baby sea lion up and down the Embarcadero.

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.