The Route I Used To Love

(I need to take a self-defense class.)

(Note to audience: Profanity ensues here…)

When I began running again some 2.5 years ago, I started out by training for the BolderBoulder 10k. The route I ran the most was a 3.5 mile loop starting at my apartment, through the Valmont/Balsam neighborhoods to Broadway, North on Broadway to Iris, Iris East to 28th Street, and South on 28th back to Valmont and, basically, my apartment just off of 28th Street and Valmont Road. It’s a great loop and can be cut into various other distances: 1 mile, 1.5 miles, 2 miles, 3 miles, just about any variation. Whichever way you run it, you end up getting a nice little uphill incline-nothing too crazy, just a gradual uphill—at the beginning, which makes you work harder to start, and a nice little downhill at the end, same deal: nothing drastic, but it gives you a bit of a rest and a chance to make sure you’re keeping your form in check, check your breathing, your pacing, your footfalls, gait, posture, etc. I love this little loop and I run it all the time.

Well, not anymore. I was running east on Iris during my second lap of what was supposed to be a 14-mile training run…so for me, 4 loops. While 14 might have been a bit overambitious, I knew I could do at least ten, so at about 6 or so I was feeling pretty good. Until this drunk sonofabitch motherfucker tried to grab me and scared the shit out of me.

I was running along, minding my own business, listening to whatever was playing on my MP3 player (I think it was Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, pilfered from a CD Jack brought over once…although as much as I can appreciate dark irony, I really hope it WASN’T that, because I don’t want to associate that song with this incident…it’s too beautiful) when I noticed someone cycling by me on my left, the outside or road-side of the sidewalk (this is important later). Except he didn’t cycle by me, he cycled up to me, and started trying to talk to me. This guy was an overweight Mexican man with deeply pockmarked skin & a bushy mustache, wearing a pair of Oakley knockoffs and an absolutely filthy parka, and he was turning to try to talk to me. I pulled one headphone out of my ear to try to hear what he was saying, and when I did, I noticed very quickly a few things:
1) He positively reeked of alcohol. He stank so badly that when the stench did hit me it nearly stopped me in my tracks.
2) His rambling—in Spanish—was completely slurred. I’m pretty sure that even if I were a native Spanish speaker I wouldn’t have understood a word this creature was saying.
3) He was barely able to balance on the bike he was riding—a piece of shit mutilated mountain bike—and was tottering all over the place. At one point during our very brief encounter he swerved and nearly ran right into me…I just reacted quickly enough.
Needless to say, I came very quickly to the conclusion that he was quite drunk. I shook my head at him repeatedly as he continued to ramble in Spanish and then, finally, seeing that this was going nowhere, picked up my pace. Then it got worse.

As I picked up my pace, he stepped his up to keep up with me. When I looked over at him, he was leering at me: he couldn’t have been more obviously leering had his tongue been hanging out of his mouth. LEERING. My friends and pretty much anyone who knows me atall knows this is one of those things I just don’t abide by very well atall. Glancing, winking, looking over, whatever, I don’t care. But fix your eyes on me with that hungry-dog expression and just stare, and buddy, I just want to punch your fucking lights out. Add this to the fact that, sorry to sound ethnicist/racist/whatever here, but it’s always fucking Mexican men who do this, who leer at women, at least in this part of the country. In the deep South the leering Mexicans are joined by leering white-trash redneck assholes, who are the very first reason I will never, ever, ever move to that pigheaded backwater piece of shit part of the world. Visiting my family there is hard enough. Training there was surreal: in addition to the fact that the oxygen saturation gave me much better splits than I get here in Colorado and that I had my own mobile aid station, my dad, schlepping water for me in the car and waiting for me at every mile mark, in that every mullet-wearing, Confederate-flag displaying, reason the word “redneck” was invented would slow their POS 40-year old Ford pickup to whistle or leer at me or both as I ran. I fucking HATE that. Is there something particularly sexy about cross-country running shorts and a singlet? A bright-red face under a mask of sweat and sunscreen? A breast-flattening sports bra? Anyway, back to my story…so then the worst thing happened…

I guess he realized that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with trying to talk to me, maybe he even figured out that I don’t speak Spanish after my repeated head-shaking, so he figured he’d step his pathetic overtures up a notch or two and lunged for me, trying to grab my arm or my wrist or my hand or something on my periphery. As he lunged, the warning bells that were going off in my head already turned to bright red sirens screaming “DO SOMETHING!” So I did. He lunged for me, I stepped out of his way and when he pulled his hand back to right his tottering bulk on the bicycle, I started to realize some things: that I wasn’t going to get out of this easily, this guy could persist and if I didn’t do something about it I was going to put myself in a seriously scary situation (despite the fact that it’s broad daylight on a heavily-trafficked road in the running capital of the world…I wasn’t even paying attention to cars on the road at this point), and—and this is what REALLY terrified me—it occurred to me that he was on the road side, and I was fenced in by him on one side and walls, fences and hedges on the other side. I was trapped. Which I think probably had something to do with what I did next. I turned to face him, still running or at least maintaining my gait and, lunging forward, put my hands out and shoved him away from me as hard as I could. Since he was already off balance, this pretty much did him in, and the last I saw of this fuckwit was him tipping off of his bike, then off of the sidewalk, toppling over and into the road. And then I ran.

I didn’t look back for blocks; I sprinted instead. Now, not only am I NOT a sprinter, but I’m an endurance runner…long and SLOW. Sprinting is NOT my thing and after about three blocks or so I felt like my lungs were going to burst and slowed, slowed, then stopped. My heart rate had skyrocketed and I could feel the blood pounding in my ears and throat when I finally slowed to a walk. Finally, gingerly, I glanced back. Whatever the hell happened to him, I don’t know. He wasn’t there anymore atall, not in the street, not on the sidewalk, nowhere to be found. For one crazy moment I freaked out and thought, ohno, what if he got AHEAD of me and was waiting for me and would be right then when I turned back around and so I spun around to face…nobody. Nothing there either. I began walking and after a few minutes, tried to start running again. I may as well have tried running the Leadville Trail 100 every day for a year. My legs were rubber and my heart rate was still coming down from a very very sudden increase. The trembling I felt internally transferred out into my body and limbs, and soon I was shaking so hard I balled my hands into fists and swung my arms back and forth extra-hard, racewalker-style, to try to keep from knowing how freaked out I really was, how much I was really shaking. I tried to run a few more times, but couldn’t, and finally resigned myself to walking back. My previously-warm leg muscles quickly became cold and achy, and I need to finish this blog fast so I can get into the shower and ease the millions of little mini-cramps I’m feeling in them now, no doubt a direct result of the significant amount of lactic acid built up that unfortunately now has nowhere to go and needs to be worked out of my muscles somehow, and the fact that I went from strong exercise to almost nothing very very quickly, and my muscles got COLD. When your muscles get cold they shrink a bit and harden a lot and if they get cold enough, every fucking step is agony. I didn’t quite get there, but I got close. And then the tears came...shuddering blustery sobs tearing my guts apart and wrenching my face...I can't imagine how terrible...and terrifying... I must have looked...and I didn't realy care. I just wanted to get home.

So, the moral of the story is, I won’t be running that route again anytime soon, if ever. There’s a lovely bike path near my apartment complex, I am just going to run there from now on, and the Rez when I can get out there, and probably take advantage of my dear friend Kristi’s home treadmill and repeated offers that I can use it whenever I want to. I’m really bummed about having to give up my favorite route, and I’m really kind of angry that from now on that incident will be burned into my brain if I even tried to run the route again. Mostly, though, I’m just resigned to finding a new route. Part of me wonders what I did to deserve this, what I put out into the world to manifest this situation, but the “how” of these things must be left to the universe, not to me, so I just need to accept it and move on. Maybe there’s a reasoning I’ll understand behind this someday. Maybe not. In the running capital of the world, however, where there seem to be as many pedestrian paths and trails as there are roads, I’m sure it won’t be too difficult to find another route to make my own.

**Afterthought: It is possible that he was just really that drunk, that he didn't lunge for me but was nearly falling off of his bike and reached for the closest object to keep him from falling? I think it certainly is possible, and while it doesn't make the behavior okay, it does give me a little bit of solace about the whole experience.