Speaking of Monday's run, I've started (out of necessity) to be a morning runner again. After the first week of it sucking, majorly, I'm actually ok with it now. Kyle and I went out on the porch last night to look at the sunset because it was gorg, and I joked that it was the first time all week I was awake while the sun was setting. Life of the party, over here! But I am trying to do EVERYTHING in my power to ensure that I stay injury free, and quality rest is up there on the list. So if I'm waking up at 4:30 or 5 am, you best believe that I'm going to bed at 9pm.
Ok, so back to Monday's run. I had a recovery run on the schedule, so I planned to run some out and back paths near my apartment because it's fairly flat near my place (just HILLS every direction that's 1/2 mile or farther away...neat). So I started running out towards the outskirts of town. This road that I run recovery runs on turns in to gravel after a mile or so, and is surrounded by corn fields, if that gives you an idea of how "out of town" this outskirts of town is. As I was running I see a large black figure near the side of the road. I assume it's a dog and keep running. As i get closer, I realize it's a LARGE wild turkey. It's probably up to my waist in height, and it's legs come up to my knees. I've seen this turkey before in this same vicinity, but it's usually quite a distance away from the road.
But not Monday morning.
As I run by, I tell the turkey, "good morning turkey!" as I typically do to wild animals, to let them know that I'm friend and not foe, and continued on my run. After a few moments I start to hear a "tick tick tick" sound. I wasn't listening to music, so I start to look at my surroundings, and after glancing over my shoulder, THE TURKEY IS FOLLOWING ME. I've been chased by birds many times on runs. Our bike trails are FULL of geese. Usually they'll run a few steps at you, hissing, and then you run by them and they're over it. I assumed the same would happen with the turkey.
Nope.
I continued at my recovery pace, because I refused to run too fast on my recovery run because of a g.d. turkey, but I continued to glance casually over my shoulder to see if it was gaining on me, or if it looked like it was going to attack me. It honestly looked like it just wanted to come along for my run! (Sidenote: after telling this to Kyle and my co-worker who hunt wild turkey, they assured me he was NOT casually joining me on my run. Apparently they're super aggressive birds, and have a fierce bite. I'm glad I didn't have this information while running, or I would've freaked out.) I started to get nervous after it was following me even longer, but I had to remind myself that I have meaty endurance runner legs, and this bird had skinny little toothpick legs. CLEARLY I should be able to outrun it (unless it decided to just catapult itself at my head, because that would drop me like a sack of potatoes, easily). After 1/3 of a mile, I no longer heard the ticking and realized that I had outrun the bird. I continued on my run, and crossed the road when I got back near that area (I feel like there should be a "why'd the runner cross the road?" joke here, but I can't come up with one. Leave me a comment if you have something clever) the bird was still there, but didn't pay attention to me.
So I survived the great turkey chase of 2013.
Saturday I walked out of my apartment to go grab a latte from Panera, and what should be outside of our apartment building. THE FREAKIN' TURKEY. IT'S STALKING ME.
Start packing, Kyle. It's time to move.
1 comment:
i was just thinking I believed turkeys were pretty aggressive..I love that you were like screw you bird I have an easy run to do!
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