| 051 | Tales of the Trails | 2009-03-02 |
Luckily I live in a city with parks large enough to have an adequate trail system. A few years back, a friend and I were running together in the park as often as possible as he was training for a marathon. Regardless of the weather we ran every scheduled day. As winter approached the short days caused us to use flashlights to help illuminate the trail in the early evenings.
As the winter days passed we grew prouder of our record of "not missing a day." We did run in some really nasty weather, but we had the clothes and experience to run without compromising our safety. It seems a bit sick to go running at night with rain and temperatures in the high thirties, but we delighted in the misery. We were hard core runners!
One evening we were running by flashlight along a narrow trail. As we ran we were discussing the cars below us that were only visible in the winter. Suddenly two bright lights appeared ahead of us, uphill and to the left. They were coming fast.
Stopping dead in our tracks, my friend and I were trying to decide what we were seeing. It looked like a car, but there were no roads. There was a park road above us, maybe the car ran off the road and was coming down the hill crashing. It was only a split second before we realized that the lights were actually from two mountain bikers. They were descending the steep hill riding almost abreast giving us the illusion of a car. My how our minds deceive.
We stepped aside to let them ride past and then trudged up the steep hill the bikes had just come down in the dark. The rest of the evening we talked about the crazy bikers and what we thought we had originally seen. Oh, we backed off our bragging of being such hard core runners as we were humbled by our meeting with the bikers; but never fear, we stopped wearing gloves that winter just to make us a little tougher.
Happy trails.