Stormageddon

Sometimes a plan that seemed like a really good idea the night before, is a really bad idea the next morning.  And so was the case on August 12th.

The plan was to run to work, about a 9 1/2 mile trek, with Rich.  We were supposed to meet near his house, about a mile from my place.  As I got ready that morning, I listened to my local public radio station.  The weather guy was talking about dangerous thunderstorms in counties I had never heard of, so I figured the storm would miss us.

When I left the house, I tuned back in using the NPR iphone app.  Yup.  I'm that nerdy.  But apparently I wasn't listening to my local station, I was listening to KQED in San Francisco.  Their weather report made no mention of thunderstorms and I clearly wasn't paying attention.

As I ran, it seemed like there were flashes of lightening every few seconds.  But I counted between the lightening and the thunder there were at least 7 or 8 seconds between them.  That meant the storm was miles away - and I still thought the storm was supposed to stay far far away, based on a now rather old weather report.

When I caught up with Rich we looked back towards my house and it seemed like I had come out from under a wall of black clouds.  It looked more like night than morning.  "We can out run it," Rich said, and I said "yeah, we can totally out run it."

Doppler radar says get the hell indoors. 

Ummm...it turns out the storm was headed straight for us at a pace of about 25 miles per hour.  Unfortunately, even in the best of conditions we don't run quite that fast.  As the clouds and lightening closed in, we went from thinking we could out run it to thinking "you know, there are a lot of Starbucks on this road.  We can just duck into one for a few minutes."

We didn't get the chance.  When the storm reached us it hit with force, like BAM suddenly it was pouring.  We ducked under an awning outside of an apartment building.  We were hoping to get into the building but it was locked.  So, there we stood for 30 long, wet minutes under an awning that was a bit too small to protect us from all the wind and rain.  And, I have to say it was pretty scary, traumatic even because there was so much thunder and lightening.

Our view from under the awning.  You never know it was 7:30 in the morning.

When the rain finally stopped, we ventured back out, hoping to finish our run, but the weather had different plans.  All that rain in such a short period of time caused flash floods.  The streets and sidewalks were like flowing rivers...or at least streams.

The water came up to my calves.  My shoes and socks were soaked.  There was so much water that it was shooting up from manhole covers.  We waded over to the median to get to higher ground.  It was epic.  And by this point I was also well on my way to being late for work.  I ended up on metro wearing stinky soaking wet running clothes, crammed in way too tightly with my fellow train riders...oh and there were delays, of course, because of the weather.