Ridin' on Rims

I was spoiled. When I was a part of Team In Training, we had a "routemeister" who would plan out the routes for our run, and set up water stops. At the end of our training, the "routemeister" retired. Now, the only water stop on Saturday mornings is at Cathy's house. Usually.

Yesterday was a Turkey Trot somewhere around here, so a bunch of people were absent on Saturday morning. And Cathy didn't have water at her house.

Kat and I were planning to run 12 miles -- a 7-mile loop over the Lurleen Wallace Bridge and back, and a 5-mile lap to the former AmSouth Bank Building and back. Well, when we got to Cathy's and discovered that there was no water, we decided to just do ten miles -- 2 5-miles loops. When we got back to our cars, we realized that the PowerAde that was there was now gone. And this was the end of our Saturday morning run. Kat and I decided to meet on Sunday morning and run the remaining 7 miles.

So, this morning, at 6 a.m., I'm out at the Rec Center waiting for Kat, and she doesn't show up. I decide that I'm going to wait until 6:15, and then go for a run by myself. I would have called her or checked for text messages, except that I left my phone at home. Oops.

At 6:12, a car comes down Campus Drive, and I can hear it before I see it. The guy is driving on a flat (now shredded) tire. He has his windown rolled down, so I assume that he can hear it, but maybe doesn't know what the sound is. I yell at him as he goes by that he has a flat tire, and he stops the car. He gets out and tells me that he knows, he thinks someone slashed his tire, but he was hoping he could get home on it! I asked him if he had a spare. He said no. Then I went around the passenger side to his flat and saw that the tire tread has beaten numerous black marks onto his white paint, and that he's already bent the rim up pretty badly. He said he lived at the other end of Campus.

He wanted to know what I would do if I were in his position. I told him that I could call my husband. He was a little sad because he didn't have a husband to call. Haha. He asked if he could borrow my phone (which of course, I left at home). So, I told him that he should just park his car and I would give him a ride home. He said he was a AAA member, so I told him he should call them to see if they can help him out.

I'm not entirely sure this guy is sober. He's definitely acting strangely. I mean, it's now 6:20 in the morning, and he's just coming home from a party. Really? I pegged him for an undergrad. Turns out, he's a first-year business grad student. I dropped him off at his home and decided to go home.

Kat had, indeed, text messaged me about not coming. It was a situation she had told me about the morning before. I figured, I'm all dressed and ready to go, I might as well go run. So, I went back out to the Rec Center and went for a 3-mile run. I HATE RUNNING BY MYSELF! That makes me all the more proud that I finished 3 miles solo.

The Lord is funny like that. If I had gotten Kat's message, I wouldn't have been there to help that guy. Now, some people might suggest that it was a bad idea for me to pick up a strange guy and let him in my car, but, again, the Lord is funny like that, and I was mostly reassured that this would be the right thing to do.