Night run at SMP (3.05.2011)
In following one of the marathon training schedules in the back of Bart Yasso’s book, My Life on the Run, today I was to do a “long, slow distance” of 10 – 15 miles. Initially planning a two-loop run on the Swope Park trails, I ended up at the Shawnee Mission Park trails instead. On my way there after 8:00, I experienced a rising concern regarding the park’s official hours of operation. The gates were open, though, and, stopping at the first sign after the entrance, I saw that beginning March first the park’s hours are until 11 p.m. Perfect. I started my run at 8:38 and figured I would need a bit over an hour per loop, so I should finish up just by 11:00, managing about fourteen miles before the park closed.
As it turned out, I called it quits after one good loop—completed in an hour and eleven minutes—but the story of the night is fairly uneventful except for a few heart beat increasing moments.
For those who haven’t run these trails, they are set up in a figure eight. The bottom portion of the eight, if one begins from the entrance near the marina parking lot, is roughly two point five miles, and the top portion of the figure eight is about two miles. A little over a mile into the top loop is a spur, an out and back that—thanks to trail workers—magically and wonderfully continues to grow in length, bit by bit, tiny parts of a mile at a time. It feels like a bit over a mile to reach the end of the spur.
Being on a night run, my headlamp band wrapped around my knit cap and I ran with the high beam pointing the way for me along the trail, lighting the curves and the rocks that jutted up from the ground. As I approached the section where I knew the spur broke off the main trail, I began to turn my head, shining the light in quick scans of the territory to the left. When a barbed wire fence began to run alongside the trail, I knew I must be close. At one point I stopped and retrace my steps briefly, fearing I may have passed the intersecting T of the spur. I had not. I ran on, fully attentive now, sweeping my headlamp often to the left of the trail. As I neared the intersection of the spur, I saw two gleaming points of yellow and thought they must be the glow of trail markings indicating the turn-off I sought. I kept my headlamp trained on these glowing points and shortly realized they were not signs of the trail at all; rather, they were the eyes of some nocturnal animal.
I slowed my pace, eventually walking, and finally coming to a complete stop as I came close enough to identify what type of animal I had the luck to observe. It was a raccoon.
The thing that disturbs me about raccoons is their apparent lack of nerves. A raccoon may look like a hip bandit, but it is in fact as cool as a seasoned thief. Once my headlamp reflected these watchful eyes, I kept the light shining directly in his or her face. The raccoon had neither moved its feet nor turned its head. It simply stared, waiting, I assumed, to startle me with a sudden burst of speed, commencing a merciless attack. Slowing to a walk and a momentary stop, the ‘coon just several yards away, my heart rate rose, and when I began walking again, I afforded the raccoon as much distance from me as possible, walking on the right-most edge of the trail. As I walked past, I kept my head turned to the left; long gone is that childhood idea that if I close my eyes I can’t be seen . . . this Mr. or Mrs. nerves-of-steel simply glared and eventually I gained the courage to turn my back on this human predator. I can only imagine the heart-rate I might experience if I were a night trail runner in California, where the possibility of mountain lions would undoubtedly kick my imagination into overdrive.
As I began the mile-long spur, my heart rate returned to its moderate pace and my thoughts retreated from the momentary panic they had experienced. But returning on this out-and-back, I found myself anticipating another run-in with this creaturely resident of the Shawnee Mission Park woods. The slightest rustle in the leaves off the trail put me on alert, and I marveled at the momentary yet sudden panic these rustlings would set upon me, feeling strangely threatened somehow by indicators that there was some other cognitive form of life in the urban woods in which I ran.
