It isn’t every day that when you decide to go on a 15-mile run, you come across a dead body. This is especially true if you are running in a highly populated area. Most people would expect that if you a person were to run across a dead body, it would be because you were running trails in the woods or on country roads.

However, this past Saturday when I left to go to the Lakefront Running Path in Chicago for my group run, I did indeed see a dead body. I live in a very populated area so I wouldn’t exactly expect to see one. It is a very residential area that I was running through to get to the lakefront and only expected to see the random early bird person out as I was.

Instead, as I was roughly 0.38 miles into my run, I saw flashing police lights. There were no sirens or anything, just the lights. As I got closer, I then saw that a police car had the street blocked and there was yellow tape up. Then, as I was passing the scene, I saw the dead body. Fortunately, it was covered with a sheet.

I do wonder what exactly happened. Was it a shooting? Maybe the person was hit by a car? I didn’t see a car around so if the person did die, it was a hit and run. I never did check the news later to find out what happened because I guess it wasn’t that important to know exactly what happened.

I wish I could say that was the most exciting thing of my run, but just another 1.25 miles later, I saw another person almost get killed by a car. This time, it was a guy who was riding his bicycle. He apparently thinks that the stop lights do not apply to him so he ran his red light. I know a lot of people on bikes and walking are guilty of this and usually it has not crazy consequences. However, at the time, the guy did come within inches of being smashed under a car.

There was traffic coming from the opposite direction of the bike. One car turned and the other car (the one that almost made roadkill of the stupid biker) was crossing the intersection. The driver of that car had to slam on his brakes to avoid hitting the guy. Then he rightly let a string of expletives fly because the potential accident was completely unnecessary.

Fortunately, no one was hit. And if the biker had been hit, I was going to stick around to defend the driver of the car that would have hit him. Seeing that really irritated me because 1) I love the idea of using a bicycle to get around for transportation and 2) when bike riders do things like that, it makes it even tougher for those who do follow the rules to get any kind of respect on the roads they are sharing with cars. You always see stories about how there are so many stupid drivers who end up “door-ing” a biker and causing their death or just driving stupidly in general and reeking havoc on bike riders.

But there are also too many bike riders who seem to think that because they are riding a bike, they should not have to follow the rules of the road. Too many end up riding on the sidewalk getting in the way of pedestrians and then doing things that nearly cause accidents. Then afterward, act as if they’ve been wronged.

Though, in so many facets of life, the same thing happens. Someone does something to cause trouble, but then acts as though nothing they did caused the problems and drama. Anyway, the rest of my run ended up being rather uneventful, which is perfectly fine by me because a drama-free run is usually a good one. Although Saturday’s run was mostly eh after the dead body and nearly seeing another one.