Think Kit Day 3:
Deck the LOLs

Here is the next prompt for SmallBox’s December Think Kit:

Let’s loosen up: share a side-splitting story from the last year. What made you laugh out loud until tears formed? What made you giggle every time it was referenced? Whether it’s a story, an image, a video – we want to hear about the banana peel on the floor, your best practical joke, or gems from the mind of a three-year-old. Whether it’s sassy, sarcastic, or just plain silly: make us laugh!

Let me be clear: I love to laugh. But also, let me be honest: I hate to share stories that I think are funny, for fear that they will fall flat. Instead, I’m going to share a story that isn’t so much “haha” funny, but more “I can’t believe that happened” funny. In a previous post, I shared that I won a marathon this year, which was incredible, but even more incredible was the unintended obstacle on the course.

That’s me in the teal top, CLIMBING THROUGH A TRAIN.

The course for this marathon enters a park near the beginning of the race, winds through the park for about a mile, and then exits. In that span, the course also crosses a set of train tracks a couple times. As I was approaching the park exit, I heard a train whistle blowing. I didn’t think much of it, until I came around a turn and saw the train. I was still about a quarter mile away, so it wasn’t entirely clear at first that the train was actually crossing the course. Runners were darting in front of the train as it was still moving, so I thought the train might be on elevated tracks of some sort and the runners were going under it. But as I got closer, I could see more clearly that they were actually crossing the tracks dangerously close to the train. At some point, the operator of the train pulled the brakes (presumably when he realized that most of those runners weren’t going to stop for the train). The train came to a complete stop directly across the road that exits the park, with a somewhat steep and very rocky embankment on either side. As runners piled up next to the train and wondered what to do (I’m pretty sure no one prepared for this in training), some took off along the embankment but were quickly turned away at the front of the train with arrest threats from the operator. After that, all it took was one daring runner to grab onto the ladder on the side of the train, and climb up and over the coupling and down the other side. Others (including me) followed suit, and we were on our way to the remaining 25 miles of the course.

A marathon is a beast of a race, so even though I saw my husband at several points over the next 25 miles (his best spectating effort yet!), I was focused on racing and didn’t think to tell him about the train incident. When I crossed the finish line, I mentioned to him that my watch showed a slightly different time than the race clock. His quizzical look made it clear that he hadn’t heard about the train debacle, and he surely didn’t know that I had climbed through it. “Oh, you will NOT believe what happened!…”