fall in (the C&O canal)

Some friends who ran in "Tom's Run Relay" told me that one of their members fell into the C&O canal during the night,  I tried to be sympathetic but a part of me wondered how that could happen ...

Well a few days ago I headed down to try to find the end of the canal in Georgetown (called the watergate it turns out) and see how much of the canal I could cover in a day - more on that some other time.  You may have heard a slow pace described as a 'conversational' pace, a pace at which the level of effort is easy enough to carry on a conversation.  I can tell you I have developed an even easier pace, a 'daydreaming' pace, a pace where sometimes you look around yourself a little bit surprised and wonder how you got there ...

Now let's talk about falling down.  There are different ways you can fall.  Take running down a rocky trail.  Some people call that technical running, You might wonder how fast you should be running downhill - I like to think the answer is in the form of another question "How fast do you want to be going when you fall?"  You sort of expect that a fall is going to happen, and you wear some gloves and try to protect the palms of your hands and just go have fun.  Unexpected falls might be a sudden and a total surprise - bam, you're on the ground trying to figure out how that happened.  Or, you might have a slow motion fall - you trip, then take one or two stagger steps, fully realizing that you're falling, and you're down.

Now about falling in the canal.  I'm moving along the edge of the trail, a pretty smooth dirt path, at 'daydream' speed.  I trip over basically nothing at all, just enough to get my weight too far forward to recover despite a couple of cartoon-fast strides.  I'm looking at where I'm going to fall, and I manage a pancake front slide off the dirt and into some green.  Some kind of green prickly weed.  But it turns out those weeds are growing up the side of canal bank, and my pancake slide takes me just over the edge, And I roll just a bit down the bank and one leg goes into the canal calve deep.  I'm grabbing for anything and there is nothing to really push on ... I got out easy enough so really not a big deal, but I'm glad no one was around to see that.  I ran into the freaking canal!

A while later I realized I lost my hat.  I'm sure it's in the canal.