The Carrot and the Stick

Braman needed to get to work early today so I had to finish my run by 6:15. Which meant that I had to leave the house by 5:15 and that my whole 5-mile run would be in the dark. I knew this in advance so yesterday I bought a headlamp to wear on my hat. I'm not sure if wearing a light on my head is a new personal low or a new high in my running dedication but there it is.

Since I start out in the village where there are streetlamps, I didn't need to use my headlamp right away. But as soon as I passed by the gas station on my way out of town, I switched it on and was glad to have it. The headlamp created a circle of light a few feet in front of me, so right by my feet was dark but I could see if I was approaching something. I didn't realize how much I bob up and down when running until the circle of light accentuated it.

It was pitch black. I was running along and turned off the highway onto a country road. There are maybe five houses on the mile-long stretch that I'm running and they're mostly set back from the road. The start of the road is flanked by tall brush on either side and the road is fairly narrow and turns a few times so there are a few blind spots. Even during the day I try to be careful here to avoid oncoming cars but, in the blackness of the pre-dawn morning, the area took on an ominous feel and all I could imagine were nasty people lurking in the brush to leap out at me or sneak up behind me as I ran.

It didn't help that my audiobook (The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova) was at a scary spot as well.

(One of the characters, Rossi, has received a mysterious old book, blank but for a two-page spread in the middle with a woodcut print of an evil dragon. His initial research shows that the woodcut print is associated with Vlad the Impaler and he goes to numerous places to learn more about Vlad and the Dracula legend. In trying to discover more about the book itself, Rossi leaves it with a friend at the Smithsonian Museum for chemical analysis. Several months later the friend calls him and tells him that the book is ready and asks that he come in person to pick it up so the valuable item won't be lost in the mail.

Rossi goes to meet his friend at his office. The friend seems much older and worn than he did the few months previous. As he relates the results of the analysis, the friend's expression seems to switch between benign and oddly sinister. He alludes to events that Rossi hasn't told him anything about and presents Rossi with a copy of a map of the supposed location of Dracula's tomb, a map that had been stolen from Rossi on a visit to Istanbul months before but which his friend claims was folded up in the back of the book. And Rossi thinks the man has fangs. Is this guy a vampire and is he going to attack Rossi? It definitely seems likely. And, while I may not have done a very good job of re-telling this part of the book, trust me that it sounds pretty scary when you're listening to it while you're running alone, in the dark, on a deserted road.)

Running in the dark is strange because it's hard to tell exactly how fast you're going because you can't really see where you are or how fast you're approaching something. But I was sufficiently weirded out by listening to this vampire book in the dark that I tried to run as fast as I could to get home as fast as I could. There was the carrot of our well-lit house combined with the stick of the scary audiobook and the fear of Dracula lurking in a roadside ditch.

I joke that I don't have any fast-twitch muscles but maybe I'm developing some because I finished the 5-miles in 49:20. (This is almost ten minutes faster than the 5-mile race I ran on Memorial Day weekend and more than 3 minutes faster than the five miles I did last week when I felt I was so speedy.) I felt so good at the end of the run and was so amazed with my less-than-ten-minute-mile performance, that, if I wasn't so terrified of it, I might make running in the dark while listening to scary stories part of my new training plan.