That time I kind of got hit by a car

I reckon that in the 7-ish years that I’ve been a regular runner I’ve run somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 miles. And yesterday, for the first time in all those miles, I was hit by a car.

I’ll let that thought linger before I explain.

It gets a lot less dramatic from here. To be honest, it would be more accurate to say that a car was hit by me.

I was on a very slow recovery jog – early Sunday morning around the Tan Track in central Melbourne – unsuccessfully attempting to shake out some of the muscle and joint pain from my 16 miler the day before. The Tan is an almost uninterrupted trail that measures just over 5k from our front door, all the way round and back home again. I do it all the time.

To get to the Tan I need to cross two roads, both of which have traffic lights and pedestrian signals at convenient spots. So it’s probably no surprise that this isn’t where a car got hit by me.

I was on the home stretch having just left the Tan to run down a very quiet residential street, picking up a bit of speed on a downhill. I’m running on a narrow pavement – a bit unusual as this road is so dead that often enough I just run in the road itself. It would have been a better idea to do that on this occasion.

The nose of a car pulls out of a concealed lane. There’s an imperceptibly small dip in the pavement, no lines painted on the road, no visibility for pedestrians or drivers. The bonnet appears and then a door and then I’m thinking “Well, this is happening.”

The driver sees me and slams on the brakes at the point at which my chest and arms splay out melodramatically across his car’s bonnet. The car comes to a stop as my right knee connects with the wing, which buckles slightly under the impact. I’ve more or less tripped over his car and broken my fall with my entire self. I stay there a fraction of a second to check whether I’m dead.

I’m not dead, but I am immensely surprised.

In fact I’m not even winded – my arm is a little uncomfortable as I landed heavily on it, but as I take a step away from the car and lean back on a convenient tree, trying to catch my breath, I remark that I really am totally fine. I’m remarking this to the driver as he lowers his window and we both look at each other, wondering who is going to shout at who.

In fact neither of us shouts. He wants to check I’m OK because that’s a good place to start and I want to apologise because I am British.

Luckily I really am OK. Perhaps a little shocked but nothing more than that. He drives off, I wave and jog the rest of the way home. Carefully.

I’d like to thank my brain, which realised early enough that my legs weren’t going to stop in time to avoid a collision, so worked out that spreading the impact as much as possible was the best alternative. For a fraction of a fraction of a second it considered swerving me out in front of the nose of the car – but if the driver hadn’t stopped then I would surely have broken a leg or hit the pavement, maybe catching an ankle or something under a front bumper and leaving myself with a large medical bill and a severe disinclination to boogie.

So what have I learned from this little escapade? Well, not much. I learned that this particular laneway is there, and that visibility is appalling, so it’s worth slowing down for a spot of green-cross-coding. I also learned what I have long-suspected: that being run over – or indeed running into cars – is literally no fun at all. More importantly, as I trotted the rest of the way home, heartrate at 30 or 40 thousand bpm, I resolved to generally be more careful. In an abstract sense, I’d like to get to 10,000 miles, or 20,000 miles, or none at all if the mood doesn’t take me, but I’d ideally like to get there on my own two feet.

Happy running, be safe out there,

Dave
(5 weeks, 6 days to 26.2)

2016 to date: km's 442, parkruns: 6, races: 1

Pedestrians and other animals

I heard recently of a pilot scheme in one of London’s bigger parks which would introduce ‘jogging lanes’ alongside the existing cycle lanes which criss-cross the greenery.  The suggestion was met with derision, outcry, mockery, confusion, exasperation and other forms of half-arsed middle-class protest about things which don’t really matter. Cue sarcastic letter to the Editor of the Times, a few column inches in cycling and running publications, and eventually things quietening down irrelevant of the eventual outcome.

But why would anyone think this was a sensible use of the precious taxpayer pennies, when there are perfectly good wars and public sector bonuses we could spending them on? Why can’t runners just share pavements and footpaths with the rest of the bipedal population?

I’ll tell you why. Because no brain activity has ever been recorded in any pedestrian in the moments before, during or immediately after they are passed by a runner. Pedestrians become jibbering wrecks, incapable of processing any decision-making thought processes at the time of interacting with a runner.

They see us coming, and they panic.

Should they step aside, and if so, which side? Should they try to speed up to avoid the looming bottleneck, or slow down, or stop entirely? Maybe they should do nothing at all and steadfastly continue on their trajectory of doom (yes, this is definitely the best bet), because the runner, as a second-class citizen, won’t mind being forced into the road to tango with oncoming traffic.  Or how about a snide and hilarious comment to accompany the encounter, just to let me know how annoying it is that you had to move half an inch to accommodate another human being? That would be brilliant, thanks.

Worse still, they don’t see me coming – I’m stuck behind them, trying to overtake. I politely say ‘excuse me’, and they scream in surprise, run around in circles, or completely ignore me. My pace is reduced to zero, and after having been forced into the road again, I sprint off into the distance, eager to thoroughly demonstrate the difference between a lazy pedestrian and a ground-pounding runner.  This makes me tired and grumpy. I go back to punch the pedestrian in the face, but he’s still spinning in circles so I leave him to it.

Beware; runners. 

Large groups produce even more unusual behaviour. Their brain waves not only shut down unilaterally, but also force the group to lock on to one another like a shoal of fish, moving, as one, in the most inconvenient direction imaginable.  Sometimes this forces a large group to continue occupying every inch of available space, making overtaking impossible without a tight squeeze or a rendition of the bus-lane tango.

Even people who weren’t previously together are spontaneously unified in their mission to make me stop or slow down. Are they being controlled by the dark forces of some anti-running supervillain? If they are then he’s doing a bloody good job. On special occasions the messages get crossed, and the well-meaning individuals will leap in opposite directions to get out of the way, creating no net difference in their human barrier but providing a charmingly symmetrical example of the good-intentioned-but-poorly-executed double leap. Unless this is another supervillain trick, in which case he’s even more dastardly than I first thought.

Then there are the dogs. I think it’s probably lovely to take a dog for a long rambling walk in the countryside, where you can let him off the lead and think beautiful thoughts about nature and clouds and the special relationship between a man and his hound. But is your dog reliable and well-mannered? Or is she actually really lovely when you get to know her, but sometimes gets a little bit bitey around new people, particularly new people moving at speed? The bitey one? Thought so. The problem with the rambling walk in the countryside is that there are other people in the countryside, and unless your dog is extremely well-connected, many of them are likely to be unfamiliar. This will come as a shock, I know. Sorry.

My local running club out for a quick jog/snack

 So when your dog runs headlong at me; a slobbering, barking, 2 ½ tonne juggernaut that looks like a cross between a pitbull and a Mk2 Challenger Tank, maybe you could take half a second to consider investing in a lead, before, perhaps, calling her off? Oh, she doesn’t come when you call? I see. That must be because you’re such a responsible dog owner and she’s such a sweetie that you didn’t think training was important. Oh well. Never mind, I don’t use my lower legs very much anyway.

What I’m getting at here is that I am a road user, a footpath user and a real live human being. I’m not a nuisance in hi-viz seeking to deliberately inconvenience you, delay your journey or deprive your dog of a tasty ankle-bone treat. I'm just a guy out for a run. 

Jogging lanes? Yes please.

Happy running

Dave

2011 to date - miles: 316.41, parkruns: 4, races: 2, miles biked: 12.85