It’s only right that in choosing a name for this site I have sunk to the level of puns, for only the torture of such wordplay can accurately capture the essence of my relationship with mankind’s feathered friends.
Or should I call them feathered fiends?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. And I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. In fact my interactions with birds during runs were nothing but positive at first. During the winter I spotted bald eagles along the Iowa River. In the spring I saw adorable baby ducklings in the park. Nature was beautiful.
How naive I was. Nature may be beautiful, but it’s deadly as well. And during the past year mother nature has tried to make this point time and again with the help of her avian offspring. Constant dive-bombing by red-winged blackbirds may seem amusing, but it is but one aspect of a multi-pronged attack spearheaded by the most viscious of natire’s winged warriors: geese.
Don’t act so surprised. Just as “ring around the rosie” taught children about the horrors of the black death, so too has “duck, duck, goose” made one thing very clear to our youth: you must flee the goose.
This training, received at such an early age, came back to me again and again over the past year as goose after goose hissed at me, chased me, flew after me, and nearly bit me as I ran along the sidewalks and trails in the area. A nice 7:40/mile pace is not enough to escape this menace, but fortunately one is capable of so much more once the fight or flight instinct kicks in. Rapid acceleration and wild waving of hands and arms may not look cool (I wonder if the people in that car realized the danger I was in) but it works.
And thus the name. For despite my best efforts to avoid them, it seems like every week or two my chosen route leads me to run afoul of one bird or another. Or rather, to run afowl.