Do you hear a banjo?

A friend of mine has recently caught the running bug and has been trying to hook up with me for a run for sometime. For a while I was on injury recovery and couldn’t make a run with him. But a couple of weeks ago, we finally got together for about three miles of hills along a country road near the Parish line. This was a clay and gravel road that runs in many directions and crossroads and forks with a few rural homes dotting the landscape. Some of it is pretty and some not, but there are some nice hills, which Monroe just really lacks. So in the interest of fellowship and hill training, I met up with him and we drove for about 15 minutes to the location.

It was a pretty morning and not yet too hot. We took a nice easy three miles–he ran at my slow pace, so I would be able to converse. Not much fun when your running buddy is panting and spitting!

We were barked at by some dogs and a couple of good ole boys yelled something at us–I think nice things but really didn’t want to stick around and see–and it was a rather uneventful run.

Two days later at church we spoke with one of the guys that tipped my buddy to the road and he said that he’d never run without a large group on those roads. You just cannot tell what some nut MIGHT do to two or fewer people, he warned. My buddy and I looked at each other and I thought us fortunate to not have had a “Deliverance moment.” While we didn’t hear banjos, there was a speeding truck that looked a little reckless and reminded me of the crazy postal driver in the 1988 Chevy Chase film “Funny Farm.”

I guess the only thing to detemine now is which one of us would have been the Ned Beatty character?