Serenity on the trails lost to a gunman.
The trails have always been a serene place to run with my teammates. We feel at peace and connected with nature and ourselves. For the first time i did not feel safe. A little less than a year ago in November my team and I were on an off-season run for Winter Running. It was a pretty normal day. We had a great run. We had a lot of girls show up and coincidentally counted how many were there that day. 12 girls. We knew there were 12. (To me this wasn’t a coincidence but a gentle protection from God).
On our way back we started hearing lots of sirens which isn’t out of the ordinary because there’s always wrecks on the road by our school. We come out of the woods and cross the road to get to our school and see multiple ambulances and fire trucks and police cars. The first thing that came to our minds was a wrestler got hurt or something. We all are laughing and enjoying ourselves as we go to the track to grab our stuff and go stretch.
Before we got there our activities director and an admin yelled at us to get inside immediately. This is when I realized something was wrong. I was the oldest person there so I went into full mama bear mode and said “sprint inside now go go go!” One of our teammates went the other way with our coach (the only two who went that way) and was trying to catch up. She also had no clue what was going on. We all probably PR’d in some sort of race running inside the school.
Once we got inside we had to go to the locker room. When we entered it was full of girls all looking so relieved to see us. One of my best friends hugged me and said “Mr.___ has been shot.” All I could think about was the fact I had seen him everyday for the whole XC season out on the trails running. Immediately I started shaking and freaking out. I didn’t have my phone because it was still at the track and I was just sitting in the locker room unaware of what was happening. We waited for over an hour until the police escorted us to our cars and gave us our things. All I could think about going home was the fact that only my coach and one teammate went the way the shooter was which is usually the way we go. We had counted how many girls were there that day which was not normal. So much went right for a day that went so wrong.
The whole night I was scared because the man was still out there somewhere. The teacher ended up being okay and just had to get the bullet removed through surgery on a non-life threatening area of his body. The next day we obviously could not run at school, but all I wanted to do was run on our trails because that is my place of serenity. But now my place of serenity was compromised. We all had to go to a counselor and talk about our experience. That was so good getting it all out. All the fear and just loss of peace was pretty crazy. The police ended up finding the dude the following day still hiding in the woods on our serene trails. For me the most liberating part was getting to see the police take him down from the window of my English class. But the craziest part was I’d seen this man for many months almost everyday. One day even alone I saw him but ran the other way because he scared me.
Our trails eventually became serene again, but not for a long time. Sometimes we still get freaked out about the whole ordeal. Even now we all still freak out by certain people or things, but we had each other to help bring serenity back to the trails. Now almost a year later I will say that experience brought my team closer together and our trails are serene again, but we will never view them the same again. Don’t take your team and trails for granted.
- Anonymous
