7 Horror Stories for Runners
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Photo by Bernd Schulz on Unsplash
The Out-and-Back
A woman set out early one foggy morning to do her weekly long run. She was alone, and the route she’d mapped was 16 miles out and back—8 miles along a series of quiet country roads, then 8 miles back the way she’d come. She had downloaded two episodes of her favorite podcast for the run, in addition to her favorite running playlist.
Everything was going well until the woman paused at the turnaround for a gel and a sip of water. That’s when took out her phone and saw it: The battery was at 2 percent.
She would have to spend the remainder of the run… alone with her thoughts.
The woman screamed and screamed. But nobody could hear her.
The Farmhouse
The man and his family had moved from the big city into an old farmhouse in the country. The house was charming, but needed lots of work. As he fixed the place up, he began to notice some odd things—furniture would move, mysteriously, overnight; doorknobs would rattle on their own; currents of chilled air would stream through rooms.
One moonless night, as the family slept, the man awoke to what sounded like a baby rattle coming from the first floor. He grabbed a flashlight and crept down the stairs to investigate.
As he put his weight on the final step, it gave way with a loud, splintering crack. The man stumbled, badly twisting his ankle. The next day he saw an orthopedist who told him he had a stress fracture and he shouldn’t run—for at least three months.
The man screamed and screamed. But nobody could hear him. (The orthopedist was deaf.)
The Volunteer
A young fellow was running a marathon, on a day much like this one, hoping for a Boston qualifier time. His race began well, and he nailed his splits all the way through mile 16. Then he began to slow. By the time he approached the 20 mile marker he was officially struggling and had nearly given up on his BQ. Just then, he saw a curious old man on the side of the road. The man didn’t say anything, but he smiled at the young runner with a twinkle in his eye, and held up a sign reading, “If a Marathon Were Easy, It’d Be Called Your Mom.”
The young fellow laughed. In the miles that followed he rallied, regaining the time he’d lost and crossing the finish line in 3:04:20—a Boston qualifying time by 40 seconds! As a race volunteer offered him a space blanket, the young man described the funny old man who had saved his race.
“That sounds like old Gus,” the volunteer said, frowning. “Last year, during this race, he slipped on a banana peel at the mile 20 mile marker, fell, and hit his head.”
The volunteer paused.
“Gus died that day.”
Just then, the race director announced that due to a misplaced traffic cone, the course was short by half a mile.
The young runner screamed and screamed. Plenty of people could hear him, but were powerless to help.
The Oval
One autumn night a young woman was doing a speed workout on a high school track. Her schedule called for a mile warmup, 6 x 800 at 5K race pace, then a mile cooldown. The warmup was easy, of course, and the first two 800s were straightforward enough. But the third repeat was tough, and the fourth was even worse. The young woman realized that her Sunday long run, just three days earlier, had left her more fatigued than she thought.
The fifth repeat was agony. The woman’s lungs and legs screamed in protest and every step required a conscious effort. The woman wanted nothing more than to run her cooldown and go home. But she pushed on, recovering for one lap before rolling into her sixth and final repeat. Knowing it was her last 800, the woman gave it all she had, carrying her exhausted body through two more laps by sheer force of will. As she finished, a feeling of rapturous relief washed over her.
“Thank God I’m done,” she said. “That was awful.”
“Nope,” said the woman’s coach, from the infield. “The workout is 8 x 800. You have to do two more.”
The young woman screamed and screamed. But nobody could hear her. Not even her coach, who was actually the ghost of a coach who, the young woman learned later, had been murdered with his own clipboard years ago at that very track, which made the story even spookier in hindsight.
The Swarm
It was a hot, humid day in the American midwest when a man decided to go for a run. It was so hot, in fact, that the man opted to go shirtless. After a few sweltering miles, the man rounded a corner… and straight into a thick cloud of gnats, hundreds of which stuck to his face, arms, neck, and torso, and some of which he swallowed.
The man screamed and screamed. Which allowed more gnats to enter his mouth.
The Scrape
A woman was running alone in a cemetery when she noticed a strange scraping sound. She stopped, and so did the scraping sound. But when she resumed running, the scraping resumed as well. This continued for some time, and the woman became increasingly frightened. Was it a wild animal? A ghost? Was someone following her? When the scraping grew louder, the woman pulled out her phone and called a friend to describe what was happening. The friend promised to Google “scraping sound running” and get back to her.
While she waited, the woman picked up the pace—but the scraping only got worse, and seemed to be getting closer with each step. The woman began to panic.
Just then, her phone rang. When she answered, her friend didn’t even say hello.
“Stop running right now!” the friend told her. “The sound is coming from inside your knee!”
The woman screamed and screamed. And that’s when she hit the gnats.
The Virus
A man woke up one morning with a sore throat, a headache, and a runny nose. He had a cold—three days before his marathon.
The man screamed and screamed. Which only made his throat worse.
