the quick brown fox…
So, a fox tried to kill me yesterday.
After work, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day while we still have them, and hauled my mountain bike over to Pocahontas State Park to ride the many very cool single-track trails through the woods.
After running a few of the shorter, easy trails to shake the dust off (it’s been a month or two since I was last there), I tried one of the more complex ones I’d not run before (Lost Spring, for those keeping track). It was a nice run, fast, downhill, and right at the edge of my skill level and/or tires, though about halfway through, a furry blur of red darted out from burrow under a dead tree stump and crossed the trail less than ten feet in front of me.
I hit the brakes right in a section of loose dirt, and felt control slipping; toward a small tree on my left, which I caught with my arm to further slow me down, though the bike kept going for another five feet or so before toppling over.
The fox didn’t even stop to check on me. Jerk.
I was undamaged, apart from a couple of little nicks on my calf and a small cut on my thumb, and the bike was dirty, but apart from a cracked rear spoke guard, likewise fine. So, I finished the run, ended up getting a little lost on the old CCC roads at the far end of the run (not the first time I’d done so, which I why I keep a copy of the park map on my phone), but found my way back to the mountain bike center, ran a few more trails, and got back to the car shortly before sunset with a little over seventeen miles on my wheels.
It was a nice day, though the fox was still a jerk.
