on running afowl

Bloody headphones.

No, I don’t mean to curse my current headphones, although I do have terrible luck with them; they never seem to last. (Since I’m not British, I’m not prone to using “bloody” as an epithet. At least not naturally.)

No, in this case they actually are bloody. Or bloodied. There’s a little dried blood on the cord. Now how did that get there?

Let me begin by making one thing clear: I’m fine. (Perhaps I should also make another thing clear: I don’t have the volume up very high at all when I run. Sometimes I can hardly hear what’s playing at all, because I realize how important it is to be aware of one’s surroundings.)

That being said, I was hit by a car while out on my run today. Well, maybe “hit” is a bit too strong. “Bumped” might be a better choice of words. Actually, the only real hitting was me pounding my fists on the hood in anger.

I had about a mile left to go and I was running on the sidewalk along a busy local commercial strip. A number of much smaller roads intersect with the strip, but only a few larger roads have traffic lights. The rest just have stop signs.

Stop signs, I might add, placed before the crosswalks.

To accommodate sometimes heavy traffic, many of these roads open up quite a bit when they intersect the main drag, so some cars can turn right while others wait to turn left, etc. As a result, some of the crosswalks are a little longer than you’d normally find crossing a street with only one lane in each direction. I entered one of these larger crosswalks and saw a white luxury SUV approaching from a little ways off. Since I knew the driver had to stop and since I knew I was perfectly visible I didn’t think much of it, but as always I kept an eye on it to be safe.

Good thing I did. Apparently intent on making a left turn, the driver kept her focus to the right, watching for a break in the traffic from that direction. (I assume once she spotted one she would then look for a similar break in the traffic to her left and speed across to make her turn.) More importantly, like many drivers she had decided that the location of the stop sign, the line painted on the road, and the presence of a clearly marked crosswalk had no bearing on where she would actually stop. Intent on taking advantage of a “wasted” ten or twelve feet, she wasn’t slowing down as soon as she should have, and she wasn’t looking anywhere other than to her right.

Fortunately some quick footwork on my part spared me any serious harm. I ended up around where the SUV driver probably thought the stop line should have been, glaring at her and smacking the hood of her vehicle as I gently bounced off it and took a tumble–more because I lost my balance due to my dance steps than because of the relatively slight impact. It was enough to take a little skin off my hands and knees, though, and I popped back up ready to read her the riot act.

I’ll say this, though: at least the driver got out and made some effort at an apology. I told her to watch both ways in the future, and that I really ought to get her license plate number and call the cops. But I didn’t. Instead, I brushed myself off, ran another mile, and washed up in a gas station bathroom as best I could.