Stained Underwear

When I started running it was merely a means of putting painful memories out of my mind. The constant pain that it put me through made me forget her face… at times. When you spend enough time out on the road and trail then you see enough crazy stuff that most people wouldn’t believe.
My first story was when I was out of a run with my buddy, trying to stay in shape for a half marathon. We hit the two mile mark we had an old van come up from behind us and passed us up and went another 40 feet or so. The next thing I saw shock me internally. An old man, he looked almost homeless, got out of the driver’s seat and went to the back of the van. He opened the back door and forced two dogs out of the van. He then took off and left the dogs behind. We saw the dogs out there for the next week before animal shelter was called and they were picked up.
Next story, I was on a long run out in the pits and running down a long forested road. I saw ten turkeys in the road. I started to laugh as I a thought came into my mind. I ran full speed at them screaming and scaring them all off. They flew, or should I say glided, down into a gully on the left side of the road. All of a sudden I heard noises to my right. I looked up the hill on my right and saw fifteen or more turkeys flying right at me. I continued to run down the road as the turkeys chased me. It took a couple of minutes but then they decided I wasn’t worth the effort.
A later run on the same road brought me to see something dangerous. First a little more detail is needed to be known about where I’m from. My county had the highest rate of meth users in the US. The surrounding counties were pretty high too. Where I run at is out in the river bottoms. I can run for hours and not see a vehicle. As I ran down the road I kept a constant pace of about 6:00 minute mile pace. It was my first long run in a couple weeks so I wanted to hit it hard. On this road you would have small hills and at the crest of each hill you could see the next crest. The road was surrounded by a dense forest. I finally made it to about fifty minutes out, ten more minutes and I can start my way back. As I hit the next crest o stopped dead in my tracks. There, 200 meters away, was two men talking to each other. One wore a black shirt the other a white shirt. I was stunned. There wasn’t any vehicle in sight, at least not on this side of the crest. I have ran this road for years and never saw anyone else on foot and only a few vehicles. Then the men shook hands. That is when I said enough is enough and I turned around and started back. When I did this one of the men took off and started running towards me. There wasn’t going to be any way he was going to catch me. There was about two miles of road that I had to travel to hit a four way intersection. I thought that if I made it to there then I would be able to lose who ever was chasing me. I ran fast, probably 5:30 pace or faster. I was about 100 meters away from the intersection when I heard it. It was an old white trash car, think old Ford LTD style. The car was barreling down the road in my direction and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to lose him now. I prepared myself to be in a fight as I hit the intersection and turned left up a large hill. He then slowed down and stared at me as he passed. I did the country thing and waved hello as he passed. He returned it and took off. The thing that scared me the most was that when I looked into the back seat of his car he had a humungous rotweiler there. I think I saw a drug deal go down and luckily I decided not to go any further than what I did, people have been killed for seeing stuff like that.
Turkeys weren’t the only animals I came into contact with on a run out in the pits. I remember one run when I saw an entire pack of coyotes in a field. Now it isn’t too strange to see coyotes out here but an entire pack moving across an open field at 3:00 in the afternoon was pretty strange. They were yelping and barking as they crossed the field. There must have been 10 or 15 of them. I also came across two different cats. The first one was a bobcat. Now any cat like this is hard to come by were I’m from and when I saw it I only could stop and take in the beauty of it. He stood there very casually and looked at me for a couple of minutes and then took off. The next cat was a cougar. I was running hard up a hill and heard something moving in the woods next to the road. I stopped and saw a tail and back end of a cougar. A little freaked out, I stopped turned around and started walking back towards my truck. My truck was about three miles away. I walked for a good quarter mile and then started running when I was surrounded by open fields.
About four years after this first encounter with a cougar I came back to my hometown for a few weeks. I went out for a run. I wasn't in the same shape that I was back then but just trying to enjoy the little time of being back home that I had. The location of this run was probably a good 5 or 6 miles away from my original location. I was a few miles into the run and seen something crossing the road. I picked it up because I thought it was a deer. As I got closer I then realized that it wasn't a deer as it wasn't tall enough and way too big to be a deer. I got even closer, I seen it wasn't alone. There it was, about 100 meters away, a cougar and her cub crossing the road. I waited a few minutes before running forward to the place where she crossed the road. I wasn't worried about being attacked; there was a open field on one side of the road that went for a half mile and a little field about 100 meters and then the treeline of the forest. I stopped looked around to see if I could see them, no luck. I did see some pretty nice sized tracks crossing the road.