A Little Fall on a Long Run

This is how last Friday's long run started out. I met my friends at the Wauponsee Glacial Trail for my 18-mile training run, but before all the fun began, I experienced a bit of that pre-run anxiety where you feel you have got to "go" (um, pee, relieve yourself) before you get started. I didn't think there were washrooms along this railroad-converted trail, didn't remember there being any last time I had been there a couple of years ago, so I decided to step off into the brush along the side before starting the run. I stepped over a wall of landscaping blocks onto what appeared to be solid ground on the other side. Once I got one leg over the wall and shifted my weight, however, I kept going. And I didn't miss the wall on the way down. I fell hard on the wall and kept going, injuring the upper inside of my thigh and my, um, nether regions.

My friends were initially stunned. One minute I'm standing there, the next minute I am gone, and all they heard was screaming as I plummeted to the other side. My friend Rhonda, as you can see, sprang into action and began trying to pull me out of the black hole below. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was bent in half laughing her ass off. And Julie... well, she was simply Julie. Oh, and there was Stephanie... she grabbed her iPhone and started snapping away. I could have been dead, but at least she could win Photo Journalist of the Year for capturing it all in pictures. They came through for me eventually though and pulled me back up to the trail. And we had a hell of a good laugh. I mean, really...what happened there?!

I was a bit hurt. I cut my inner thigh on the wall, and it burned and bled for the entire run. I have a pretty good-sized bruise in a pretty delicate area. It's been four days now, and that scrape is still tender and oozing (sorry for being a little gross) and makes cycling very, very uncomfortable. But I got that darn run in, and we laughed about my mishap the entire time...and still are, in fact. I have a feeling we are going to be laughing about this incident for a long time to come. Such is life with us. We often say we need our own reality TV show. Stay tuned. Because life is definitely an adventure on this end.