Run, Interrupted

Today's run was intended to be 10 miles. I met up with a group of friends running from the Central Market on Lovers Lane in Dallas.  I was one of the slowest in the group, but that's fine with me.  We all spread out over the run and then Dana gave her map to Luis and said she'd stick with me, since we were similar pace and I had a map.

About 3 1/2 miles in, Dana and I cross the intersection at Mockingbird & Hillcrest and about 30-40 seconds later, when we're a good block from the intersection, we hear a loud crash and metal scraping.  We look back to see two cars have crashed at the intesection.  No one is getting out. 

So we sprint back to the crash.  There we find a black Range Rover and a small gray pickup truck.  The Range Rover's front is completely smashed in, with pieces everywhere.  The truck must have spun around and the driver side has hit the big stoplight pole.  Dana calls 911 and talks to the woman in the truck who is complaining that her side hurts.  She's calling her husband and crying.  I go over to the Range Rover where the frail woman there is still very shook up and just sitting there. The powder's still coming off the airbag.  Dana sees fluid leaking out of the front of the Range Rover and suggests the woman gets out.  The crush to the front meant that I had to hold the door open as hard as I could while the woman squeezed out.  We moved her to the side and waited for the sirens.

Fire truck, police, and ambulance came.  While we're waiting, we call anyone on the run who might have a phone so they'll know why we're delayed.  They loaded the woman from the truck onto the gurney and to the ambulance.  The EMT asks the woman from the Range Rover if she's okay and she says she's fine.  While we're all watching though, she's rubbing one side of her chest, and when I ask, she says it hurts.  I grab one of the EMTs and let him know that while she said she's okay, she's not acting it, and he says he'll check her out.  The police had us wait around to give a statement, which wasn't helpful since we never actually saw the accident.

So we start our run back up after this 20 minute interruption.  We've decided that we'll switch to a shorter route that was mapped out ahead of time too.  This way we'll finish around the time the others do.

As we run again, it finally dawns on us that if we'd gone through that intersection 40 seconds earlier, it could have been really scary for us.  I'd hope we'd see the cars before it happened, but you never know.

Sadly, since we had a quick sprint back to the crash, then standing around not stretching for 20 minutes, our legs have stiffened way up.  It was a struggle to get back to the car.

We finished with 7.5 miles.  And the rest got back from the 10-miler about 10 minutes later to hang around and chat.

I hope the two women are both okay.  Meanwhile, the truncated run kept me from the 25 miles I'd thought would be fun to hit this week, but I did finish runs totalling 22.5 miles this week, so I'm still pretty happy!

Happy, and SAFE, Running!