First of all, trail runs don’t count.
It happened to me today, 4 minutes into my run. I was on the asphalt street, it was flat, daylight, dry, no traffic. My left foot stepped on part of a thick wire circular thing that might have once been part of a hubcap. My right foot got caught inside the circle, and down I went. I have no major damage, just a scraped knee, scraped elbow, two scraped plams, and a sore thumb. This is my first crash in 21 years of running.
Any other stories out there?
Running down a steep hill going across the driveway to a parking lot. Tripped and went headfirst towards the concrete (the pebbled kind). I managed to pull it into a roll but it was a skidding roll. Had bleeders on both knees and elbows and across my back and ass. No noggin contact though. Waddled onto the next bus to go home. Turned a few heads.
I’ve been running the same 7km route at lunchtime for 7 years now. Down by the Marina. Lovely run… For seven years I’ve been stepping onthe same sewer grate as I step froma parking lot up a small kerb, onto the sidewalk. This time, I put my foot about 2" to the right and hit the lip of the grate that just happened to be 1" higher than the rest of the grate. Sprained ankle as I roll/skid/hurl profanities into the air.
Luckily (if anything good can come from such an event) I just about crashed into a yacht sales shop. What do Yachties do? DRINK. And with those drinks they need ICE. I managed to get a bag of ice onto my ankle within about 90 seconds of the crash. I sat on their comfy couch with my leg up, with ice on it for the recommended 20 minutes. I then phoned for a ride back to the gym where I get changed. They have a physio there so I got treated within an hour. Several visits later and “she’s all good”.
I’ve only had one other crash while running but that doesn’t really count coz it was in the snow and I couldn’t see the massive pothole I stepped in.
I crash a lot more running than cycling. Usually about 3 times per year. Those metal rings once attacked my wife on a run and took her down. Once they get hold of you, there’s nothing you can do.
Sort of. . .I was hauling butt through the Quantico woods with a full combat load during my Infantry Officer’s Course, and lugging an M240G Machine Gun. We were conducting a “movment to contact”. . .a sort of moving attack. . . We had to cross a roadway so we were moving quickly through the open area. Because the scrub along the roadway was tall, I didn’t see that the asphalt was raised and ended up biting it skidding across the roadway. Well. . .since weapons are treated like bikes (i.e. save the bike at all costs). . .I went skidding with my knuckles underneath the machine gun. Result: Two sets of hamburger knuckles, a hole ground in the knee of my cammies and a sorely bruised ego when we finally had a moment later for my buddies to laugh their asses off.
I crashed hard in a group run a few years ago in St. Pete, Fl. Damn crabs! There were two of them, they work in pairs! (Hot Shots)
One week before a marathon, I go out for a run. I’m running on the sidewalk b/c it is 5:30 PM and there is a lot of traffic. 2 women are oncoming, walking side by side on the sidewalk gabbing. They can’t be bothered to share the sidewalk so I step into the grass to go around. The grass in the hole had grown to the same height as the rest of the grass and I went down hard, rolling into the street of heavy traffic. The women didn’t even stop.
It happened once more (although without the spectacular crash). From then on, I’m keeping my share of the sidewalk.
I fall pretty regularly. I figure it’s a hazard that comes with the territory - if you run enough miles you’re bound to fall once in a while. Most of my falls occur in the dark on winter mornings, however, I don’t always have the dark as an excuse. My last was the worse yet. It was a nice day this last February, and nice days in February in PA are few and far between. I went out for a 2 hour run, and within 1 mile of my house, I fell going down a steep, paved road. I still don’t know why I fell - gravel on the road, an uneven surface, I have no idea. But down I went - the radio for my headphones hit the ground and the batteries skittered across the road. I picked up myself and the batteries, and inspected the damage; two bloody knees. I walked off the pain for a few hundred yards, and finished the run with blood running down my legs into my socks. Once I got home, I started to clean up and realized that one of my knees was pretty badly gashed. Though the thought of the emergency room on a Saturday morning wasn’t appealing, I knew that without stitches the wound would take a long time to heal and I was concerned about swimming, too, with an open wound like that. So I ended up with 4 stitches, and my knees, though not sore anymore, still look it - they are a very bright pink and still itch a little bit. The emergency room bill? About $1000 total, mostly covered by insurance.
In college the first group of us XC guys were running by soroity row. We are at a 4 way stop. I somehow catch the side of my foot on something and crash. right in front of about 40 girls. Everybody was laughing their ass off and no one chick offered me any TLC.
I file this under “Stupid Triathlete Tricks”…
While on a 10 mile run on a country road near my house - on perfectly flat, clear shoulder - I managed to slip my right foot neatly into the loop of my left shoe string. One second I’m running along at ~8 MPH, the next my feet are tied together. Of course, this occured just as the first car I’ve seen in 15 minutes comes cruising along, full of teenage boys, who proceeded to laugh their heads off. No major injury, just some minor scrapes and a bruised ego.
One day I was running along quite happily. Twas a beautiful evening, the sun was setting in glorious hues of red, orange and gold. I was on the sidewalk, beside a park that is on my 5 mile loop.
…
Splat, face down into the sidewalk. Both my feet had gotten caught in a strand of fishing line that was lying on the sidewalk, the rest of which was wrapped around a nearby telephone pole. Never saw it coming. To add insult to injury, I was so tangled in this stuff that it took about 5 minutes to extricate myself. This stuff was probably 20lb test, just about impossible to break with bare hands, and I don’t normally run with a pocketknife or pair of scissors.
I was also about 2 miles from the closest fishing hole. Go figure.
More in line with tri training, yet still tinged with military overtones. . .
So its about a week after 9/11. . .I’ve been out for one of my usual easy 5-8 milers around the remote areas of the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station. I left out in daylight, but since we were working long days, it must have been late evening because when I came back to our FAST company area it was dark. Well, sometime in the time period between leaving and returning, our enterprising Marines had strung up concertina wire across the usual run access point. Being dark out, and having run this route umpteen hundred times, I never saw the concertina coming. Wham, I’m slamming down face first, the concertina wire providing a fine fulcrum as the sharp tines dug into the naked flesh of my legs. Now I’ve gotten caught up in concertina many times in cammies. At worst, thats a nuisance that requires some stitching up of a set of field cammies. Flesh and concertina wire, on the other hand, presents a wholly different scenario. The tines dug in and didn’t let go. Just a slight ripping of the epidermal layer. It took me fully 2 minutes to extract myself from that concertina. The more I struggled to get up, the more it dug into my skin, and then it started catching shoes, socks and shorts. By the time I finally got off of it blood was streaming down my legs in heavy rivulets. Eight stitches and 1/2 a pint of blood later I was patched up and on my way. I was quite a scene, though, walking onto the company quarterdeck covered in blood like that. In the end it just reinforced to the Marines that I am indeed crazy.
I think all of my running crashes have taken place on a track.
I had a good crash this winter while doing an interval workout on my college’s indoor track. We’re starting a 300 repeat and coming around the first corner, the two guys ahead of me get tangled up and start to go down. I also get tangled up and end up biting it worse than either of them, rolling around on the track with no shirt on, tearing up my arms and back.
My senior year of highschool, running my first 800 meter race(I was normally a longer distance guy) I got tripped by the guys ahead and behind and went down pretty hard and had to be hurdled by the chase pack of guys behind the lead group that I was in.
But the best one I have is when I bit it while running my first 3000m steeplechase race my junior year of highschool. On the last lap, I hook my ankle on the water barrier and go head first into the pit. here are the pictures, which I highly recommend. http://student.stlawu.edu/~jtfarr03/dusen.html
Many years ago I was running a 5k. I was just behind the lead woman. Just after we went around a corner she ran SMACK right into a parked car. it looked like she was clothes-lined by a NFL linebacker! She bounced back up very fast like she was in a cartoon. Funny and scary at the same time! (she never passed me back either)
My roommate tells a story about the time he sprained his ankle on a rock while running on the beach. He says he was looking at a pair of surf boards … Translated he was looking at two girls in their bikinis and sprained his ankle in the process…
Ah, the run crash… I was out with my training partner, and we were stretching our normal “fast” 6-mile training run to 7.5. We supplemented the end of our normal run through a neighborhood with flagstone sidewalks. About half a mile from the end of the run I see the uneven flagstone and think to myself “I need to pick my feet up”. Either the synapses were no longer firing or the muscles just didn’t take the signal, but I hit the first uneven flagstone, went sprawling, and opened up my knee as I fell on the second. Bloodied and battered I finished the run while my training partner laughed and laughed. She bought me knee-pads for Christmas.
Of course I can one-up this category. I’ve fallen on the swim…
It’s been about my best kept secret. No one knew where the sprained ankle came from until now. I was about 3 miles out and about to hit my route home. Going down a gentle hill, white cargo van at the stop sign. Out of no where, no rocks, cracks on the pavement, nothing, down I go. The van didn’t even see if I was ok, which was good. My left ankle hurt like hell to walk on, but it wasn’t too bad running, uphill 3 miles home. I still live in fear of that intersection.
I feel better, the secret is out…