I run with my family most days. Sundays the husband comes out, pushes the big orange BOB with both kids in it, and even runs slow with our oldest daughter. He has her run part of the way and she rides the rest. The Kid’s Marathon is a few weeks.

I don’t run alone but we don’t run side by side either. While my husband runs with my daughter he is behind me, then after a while with her back in the stroller, he catches up. This past Sunday, he laid out what we were going to do.

“Four miles out, four back. Should be an hour and a half,” he said.

I was ahead for a while, feeling the freedom of running at my own pace. The trail wasn’t crowded but there was a steady stream of people to make me feel at ease. An older couple, a woman with a dog, a few single male joggers, none looked menacing. One African American man wore a neat grey jogging suit and smiled cheerfully as he passed me. His hair was flecked with grey under a brown beanie cap. He reminded me of an actor I grew up watching on TV.

Some joggers aren’t as reassuring. I feel the need to speed past them, trying to get out of the alone space, and get around the next corner where I imagine that a family of bikers will be spread across the trail. I passed one guy who had longish sandy hair, loose, ill fitting shorts and shirt, and his white face was red and sweaty. He looked angry. His head snapped up and he scowled as I passed. If I were with my husband it wouldn’t matter as much but when I am alone on the trail, I watch everyone.

My husband caught up to me for a while so I decided to veer off the path to do the Fearsome Hill. He kept going straight. I would catch up to him in no time. At worst, I would see him when he turned around at four miles. I did my hill, then hurried back down when I caught sight of a small blue tent behind some bushes, and continued on the path. Twenty minutes went by and I didn’t see him. My daughter would be getting out somewhere along the way for another half mile so that would slow them down.

When I finally decided to turn around, Garmin said we had been out over fifty minutes and had gone 4.09 miles. Maybe I missed him somehow. I turned around, walked some, then sprinted briefly when my GU kicked in. Then there I was. A long stretch of trail winding behind and in front of me. On all sides nothing but trees and buses. Ahead, the trail intersected with a small road.

A grey Jeep Cherokee appeared and slowly drove down and disappeared in to the trees. I didn’t see it come out the other side. There were no houses there, no reason for a car to be there. I looked behind me in hopes of seeing the Orange BOB come around the corner. Nothing.

The Jeep finally turned around slowly but no one got out or in that I could see. I was aware of how deserted the trail had suddenly become. No sounds except the whispery crunch of the Jeeps tires on the road ahead. The shrew in me was coming out, already planning the chewing my husband’s ass was going to get if he ever made it back. The Jeep was not moving and I didn’t either, I started running back down the trail, away from the road. I didn’t want to do this though in case I was actually running farther away from my husband.

I looked back toward the road and I couldn’t see the Jeep but that didn’t mean it wasn’t waiting in the trees. Finally I saw the jogger in the grey suit come around a bend in the trail. Upon seeing him I felt my anxiety evaporate. This must have been a long run day for him as well if he was coming back this way again. I began running toward the road again, feeling safer. I kept within sight of him, or just around the corner until I came across a family of bikers. Families on the trail have the ultimate calming effect.  Nothing bad can happen with mom, dad and the tots watching. Right?

As I ran I thought about what the jogger might have been thinking, if he had been thinking of me at all. I have read enough times that black men feel  insulted when white women cross the street to avoid them.

Did that jogger think that I was afraid of him? I did start running again when I saw him come around the corner.

When my husband finally came in to view, sweating and grinning, the jogger was not much farther ahead of him. He passed us right when I stopped to fix my most fearsome stare on the love of my life.

“So when did you turn around?” I asked.

“Four and a half miles,” he said wiping the sweat from his face. He was beaming, still proud of himself for exceeding the goal.

My daughter was not strapped in to the stroller. She was turned around in her seat, hanging on to the collapsed visor, smiling up at me.

“What was the time when you turned around?” I asked.

“Fifty nine minutes.”

“And what did we say? Four miles, forty five minutes,” I said.

I was relieved that he wasn’t lying in a ditch along the trail, the kids were safe, and I hadn’t been hauled off in the Jeep. Still I had to make sure he understood.

“That was a Safety Violation,” I said for my daughter’s benefit. She should understand why I was upset with Daddy. “We agreed on a time. If we are separated like that, then we need to stick to what we say.”

He held his head low in a dramatic posture of submission. “I’m sorry. Slap my head.”

He loves NCIS. I should tell him that Gibbs once played Ted Bundy. He wasn’t so funny then.

“No. Really. There was this creepy Jeep and I waited and waited for you and if it weren’t for that guy who was running behind me I might have been waiting over there for you forever! I didn’t know if you had already turned around or what. What if I had missed you somehow?” My voice was becoming shrill.

I stopped myself before I morphed fully in to that shrieking woman who thinks nothing of chewing her husband out in front of God and everyone when his brain quits working.

I hoped the jogger heard me, I felt the need to show my gratitude somehow, but when I looked around he had disappeared around the corner.