Tales of horror from the nature trail

Yesterday morning I ran on the trail for 45 minutes. Forty-four minutes of this time was spent thinking, “Yippee! After today and Saturday, I will never have to run 45 minutes again! Except for that half-marathon thingy, of course, which is two and a half hours long, not 45 minutes, so it doesn’t technically count.”

The other minute of this time was spent thinking, “Holy crap, I just swallowed a bug.”

As I began singing that old kid’s song about a lady who swallowed a fly, I wondered if this meant I would now have to eat a spider to catch the fly, and then a bird to catch the spider, and then a cat and a dog and a goat. I don’t even know where to find a goat in Indiana. And dear Lord, how badly would all this eating wreck my diet?

Luckily, I hadn’t actually swallowed the bug, just caught it in my teeth as I was plodding down the trail panting with my mouth open, so I spit it out into my hand. It [...]

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