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

A very ordinary superpower

Let's be honest, it's not a strong look.

I was out for a run the other night in the absolute Baltic cold of January in Scotland. Leggings aren’t a strong look for me but who cares how you look when it’s dark and you’re out running, right? 

But imagine my horror when I thought I spotted a member of my employer’s senior management team up ahead when out for a run dressed in stretchy fluorescent garb. I imagined their cheerful greeting followed by an incredulous "What are you out running for in this weather?" as their eyes scanned down to my spindly ankles, wrapped in lycra and gently steaming.

The first answer that popped into my head was “Oh I like to keep fit so I’ll be ready when the revolution comes.”

Luckily the senior colleague I spotted turned out to be a low-quality lookalike and not the real thing (it was dark and snowing) and this conversation didn’t actually happen, because if it did I feel certain that there would be some detailed notes appended to my HR file quicker than you can say “We think your talents would be better deployed literally anywhere but here.”

But this hypothetical conversation made me think about running as an actual practical skill. If I’m honest there really are few scenarios in which running would be the quickest, or the easiest, or the only form of transport left in a crisis.

We’re going to need a War of the Worlds-eque apocalyptic event in which every car on the planet suffers a simultaneous electrical fault (for example), in which every bicycle is also stolen by a marauding alien overlord (could happen), all the horses have been put into Iceland burgers (underway) and there are also leaves on the line and/or overrunning engineering works at Darlington (all but guaranteed). Seems a tall order.

Even then, the heroic task that will save the day needs to be no more than about 20 miles away if I’m to be any use when I get there to do it and ideally this cataclysmic event shouldn’t happen too close to lunch because I am really not up to much - let alone saving the world - with a side stitch.

I once read that Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond became stranded in a winter flood 16 miles from home at 3am, and rather than miss his daughter’s birthday the following day he abandoned his car, changed into some running kit he happened to have with him, and ran the rest of the way. That makes running seem like a skill worth having.

I suppose the closest I’ve ever come to genuinely using my one and only very mediocre superpower is that I’ve caught a few trains and buses that others would have missed, because I don’t mind running a mile or two flat out if needs must. I once caught a series of connections that meant a sprint to a tube station, a run across the concourse into a train station and later an amazingly long jog to an airport bus. I sweated in the queue for security then sprinted through the terminal and was the last one on the plane, which took me from London to Edinburgh. The following day I had a job interview, a day after that I had a job offer, and a month later I moved back to Scotland and into a flat with the Crew Chief.

That was five years ago, and I’m so glad I ran for it.

Happy running

Dave

2015 to date: miles run 71.59