Regrets While Running
By Eva Syrovy
Two things you should know about me: I don’t really like to run, and I’ve completed five marathons.
And I wish I could go on and talk about the athletic prowess I found in my 50’s, that had been sleeping all through the years I got laughed at in middle-school PE classes. But I’m so slow, I’ve never finished anywhere higher than the last quartile.
It’s more the mulish determination, honed over generations of my potato-farmer ancestors, that’s resulted in my mother, who climbs mountains at 86, and in me. Besides, I’ve found that for someone like me, who really likes to eat, challenging exercise is the best way to keep excess weight off, running is pretty challenging. And the best way to keep it up is to sign up for a long race at which I don’t want to be humiliated.
So I signed up for a half-ironman triathlon, in Boulder, this month. And I have been training for that 70.3 miles of swimming, cycling and running.
During a recent training running night, the cool temperature and light breeze should have made the conditions perfect. But it was the last session of my workout week, and I was dragging.
Most of my route involves a slightly inclining two-lane road divided by a drainage ditch, and it is pretty quiet outside of rush hour. As I always do, I ran up the bike lane. Ten feet from the one major intersection, a Toyota pulled up on my left. The man inside rolled his passenger window down, and said, “Get on the sidewalk.”
I replied, “I’m in the bike lane, sir.”
He pulled around my back and got into the turn lane to the right of me. “You’re not safe,” he said.
Suddenly he’d made me very angry. At this same intersection, when I ride my bike, the motorized vehicles to the left and right of me much too often terrify me by letting their mirrors get within scant inches of my helmet. I’d had it with them all, and this guy’s window was down — meaning he would hear me.
So I yelled an ugly epithet, as loud as my run-stressed lungs would let me.
He turned right and I ran on. Self satisfied, thinking that I’d finally told off all those drivers that think they – not pedestrians and cyclists – are the owners of the road, and nobody should get in their way.
It wasn’t until I topped that long, slow hill, about a mile later, that I reconsidered.
I remembered that the driver had looked a little bewildered at my exclamation. I considered that he may indeed have been attempting to keep me safe, not verbalize his inherent superiority over pedestrians.
It had been a hard week, full of parents’ challenging requests, other teachers’ unreasonable restrictions, and supervisors’ mildly reproving talks. I wondered if, in my exclamation, I had not just let go, not my anger at the man driving the Toyota, but all my current angers at the world. And I regretted my bad manners.
It’s easy, of course, to apply this sort of reasoning to everyone – perhaps the Ukrainians and Russians killing each other so relentlessly are just venting their anger at the injustice of an economic system that’s morphed simply from one kleptocracy to another, for example.
But I can think of one much closer to home. Cyclists and pedestrians do get killed by cars and trucks, so often that it doesn’t surprise us – and I wonder, how many of those deaths are at least partially caused by our anger, at all the things that have gone wrong in our world that week?
So I want to make some amends, and say, to the middle-aged driver with collar-length hair, who ruefully chuckled at my unwarranted and rude exclamation at the intersection one recent evening – I am sorry, sir.
Eva Syrovy lives and teaches in Colorado Springs. She is a regular contributor to the Denver Post and other publications. This essay is exclusive to the Greater Park Hill News.