A Frightening Encounter on a Dark Road Nearly Took Night Running From Me. This Year, I’m Taking It Back.

I N THE DARK, the headlights cast a distorted version of my silhouette on the industrial building to my left as the vehicle makes its way past me. I’m running along an otherwise desolate road, not far from my house. The car comes to a halt at the stop sign about 300 feet in front of me—and idles. My legs instinctively slow down, my body reacting before my mind has a chance to catch up. I quickly calculate what to do next. There are no side streets I can turn into—I either have to run past the car or turn around, which would add a few miles to my run that I’m not ready for. Maybe the driver is just checking his phone, I tell myself.I decide to zip by.But the broad-shouldered man with a long graying beard at the wheel is waiting for me with the window rolled down, his arm resting in its frame. He starts shouting before I can make sense of the situation: What do I think I am doing, running in the dark? Am I trying to get killed? My body tenses, anticipating the man’s possible next move. He has daughters my age, he continues, and he’d kill them if they did that. Could I at least carry this with me, he roars, throwing a key-chain alarm to my feet, then driving off before I have a chance to react.I sprint the last half a mile home, propelled by anxious energy. My inability to focus only fuels my confusion; so does the blue egg-shaped alarm in my trembling hand that I don’t have a clear memory of picking up but am holding nevertheless. I try to replay in my head how it got there—and why. I have reflective bands on both my arms and my ankles, so drivers can spot me. I use my phone’s light to illuminate the ground in front of me whenever I need to.The next day, I don’t run outside in the dark. Too cold, I convince myself when I step on the treadmill I hate so much in my apartment complex gym. Too rattled, is what I am unwilling to admit. Because do I have any right to feel that way when technically nothing happened to me? The stranger, in the end, didn’t hurt me.Still, something changed on the road in the dark.With every rhythmic thump the belt makes, I am less determined to keep going. My mind can’t handle the monotony. I start skipping days when I cannot make it out for a daytime run. At some point over the next few weeks, the key to the gym falls behind the shoe rack, and I don’t even notice.THE LIKELY DIAGNOSIS is seasonal affective disorder. It could also be winter blues, but that one is milder and more temporary. My somber mood and low energy seem constant. For most people, it passes by spring, my therapist says. What helps? For one, exercise! But at that point, my couch’s cushions have resigned to accepting my body’s indentation as their new shape.By the time spring comes, my fitness is at odds with my enthusiasm for the prolonged daylight, and I end up with shin splints. I spend the rest of the year trying to heal and return to form.We’ve long ago dismantled the patriarchal notion that men should be our protectors when, in fact, they often pose the danger.I don’t forget about the gray-bearded man. In fact, I share the story, framing it as a silly encounter. “Would you believe that?” I say with a forced smile.“That’s not okay,” my friends and coworkers answer with their words as much as their faces.My feelings start morphing from self-blame into anger. What should have been clear to me from the beginning dawns on me slowly: Vigilance is important, but the solution to a stranger’s concerns about my safety is not to instill more fear in the name of “protection.” Women running at night are not the problem. We’ve long ago dismantled the patriarchal notion that men should be our protectors when, in fact, they often pose the danger.And so when the clock falls back an hour at the start of November, I’m determined not to fall back into a cycle of seasonal depression and injury.I choose to run.BY MID-DECEMBER, it’s dark by 4:30 p.m. I wrap my torso in color-changing LED tubes. Today I pick emerald. As I descend the trail that clings to the bank of the Delaware River, the historic cantilever bridge that crosses the water comes into view, itself wrapped in green color-changing lights. I smile for no other reason but that we match.I run up a semicircle road where, for a moment, the world is reduced to cones of warm yellow glowing from vintage streetlights. My chest lamp illuminates just enough ground in front of me to fit my next two steps. Beyond that, I trust that my feet remember what my eyes cannot see.The darkness has a way of taming my unruly mind. The stillness mutes my whirling thoughts, a nearly impossible achievement among the hectic noise of daylight. It’s the closest I come to meditating, to understanding what it means to be present. It doesn’t matter where the road leads or how long is left of my run; it’s only here and now. The quiet is mostly disrupted by my own two feet. They take turns striking the ground, but their thuds meet in the echo that reverberates off building walls before getting swallowed up by the endless nightfall blue encircling me.How did I ever allow this to be taken away from me?Someone lingers at the end of the sidewalk in front of me, and I instinctively switch to the opposite side, picking up speed.The person pays me no mind, looking in the direction of a leash they’re holding, the end of which I cannot make out. The black road becomes deserted again, and I slow my pace. What was born out of necessity has grown into my favorite part of the day. I love this. I need this. This is the world I want to live in.In the dark, I keep running.This article originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of Runner’s World.Pavlína Černá, an RRCA-certified run coach and cycling enthusiast, has been with Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Popular Mechanics since August 2021. When she doesn’t edit, she writes; when she doesn’t write, she reads or translates. In whatever time she has left, you can find her outside running, riding, or roller-skating to the beat of one of the many audiobooks on her TBL list.