Snakes on a Road

I am on vacation in North Carolina, spending a week in a beach house in Sunset Beach. It's tough to get all your training hours done when you're out of town, so I'm planning an squeezing them in whenever I can.

I took the red-eye from Los Angeles Thursday night, and stayed with friends in Raleigh (who are part of the beach-house crew). My hosts had some errands to do around lunchtime Friday, so I decided to take advantage of the free time and do a one-hour run.

I had to run along a fairly busy highway (there's pretty much only one road there.)   I ran facing traffic, on a five-foot shoulder, hugging the grass as closely as possible. Every few hundred yards there would be some form of road trash in front of me: a piece of a blown-out tire, some rubber piping, strips of unknown plastic. At one point I saw a large piled of coiled-up debris in the middle of the shoulder. When I got about two feet in front of it I realized it wasn't trash but a snake. A HUGE snake.

Now I know what you're thinking: I tend to exaggerate snake stories. But I really mean it this time; this snake was BIG. I later found out it was a Black Rat Snake, which can grow to be 6-8 feet long. That's a lot of snake.

Naturally the snake didn't do anything, but I was completely freaked out. From that point out, every shadow looked like a snake to me. So instead of running along the edge of the shoulder, I started running in the middle of the lane of oncoming traffic. I would go back on to the shoulder if, say, a truck was coming my way but pretty much I tried to stay as far away from the grass as possible.

Of course when I got back to the house, I told my friends "ohmygod you wouldn't believe the snake I saw!" They were very non-chalant about it. "Sounds like a Black Snake. We have one living under our porch." They have a six-foot-plus serpent living with them and they can get to sleep every night?! These people are freaking crazy.