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Tonight I have a good story to tell. I have been trying to run as much as possible on our base, training for a half marathon on Sunday. It has been warming up and the time to run is either in the morning or at night. The afternoons are getting warm and the traffic is pretty bad. I am not a morning person, so the night time is the right time for me.
Tonight I was running with a guy from my unit. We noticed the wind was picking up and that some storm clouds were moving in. It seemed to be an ok time to run, my father-in-law runs when it is subzero temperatures, I felt that I could do this little run. We were heading out for our first mile, the wind was pretty strong so we decided to turn around and head back to our tents. It was the second mile that things seemed to change.
As we were running, we saw what looked like a huge cloud of thick black smoke. We knew it was sand, and thought that maybe we should stop to let it blow by. My previous Iraq experiences told me that most sand storms do not just “blow by”. We decided to run head first into it, hoping that it would not be that far until we were out of it. I could feel the sand starting to hit my face, not hard but I could feel it. Soon I felt like I was in the middle of a good old Minnesota fog. I could not see any lights in front of me, or my running partner behind me. I stopped a couple of times to flash my light on him, he flashed his light back. As we ran, trash was blowing all around us. I felt like I was in a horror movie, waiting to hear him or myself being sucked up by the huge storm cloud.
It only took us about five minutes, but felt longer, to make it through the cloud and back to the lighted streets. We laughed about how we saw it and decided to take it on. I took a picture of myself; it does not do justice to the amount of dust that is blowing around or what is in my lungs, but it makes my hair look almost white. I am sure I will be coughing it up for the next year.
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