I’m still trying to figure out if running is going to help me live longer or just kill me outright.

A little while ago I dropped my kids off at their karate class and was sporting enough night-time winter running gear that my son gave me a new moniker: safety dad. I wore a blinking arm band over a reflective jacket, a headlamp, and had YakTrax over my shoes for the ice-y surfaces. With my wicking layers and $15 socks I was ready for anything nature could throw my way. Anything except getting the piss scared out of me.

On Tuesday nights, while my kids are learning how to use mental discipline to resist kicking the crap out of people who deserve it, I take a nine-mile route that is half suburban sidewalks, and half through one of the largest municipal parks in North America. Because of the early darkness of the winter months I had been relocating these evening runs to all suburbia, avoiding Nose Hill Park’s complete lack of lighting until Earth’s northern hemisphere started to tilt a little more sunward, but I’d gotten sick of waiting for the days to get longer and bought the aforementioned headlamp.

I was stoked to go back to my usual park route, not thinking about the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to see the square root of bugger all outside the few feet of illumination the headlamp provided. Still, even in the dark I was happy to just be getting the hell out of regular suburbia with its ice-coated sidewalks, cell-phone yapping SUV drivers, and snow-rutted intersections.

During the day the park provides a majestic view of the Rocky Mountains, but at night it’s blacker than a tobacco lobbyist’s soul. Within half a mile I felt completely cut off from society. It was just me and the inky darkness. And Metallica. Really loud Metallica.

While the place can be busy on a nice day, it wasn’t surprising that there was not another soul around. When it comes to runners I guess I’m more mentally challenged than is typical; other people were smart enough to stay away at night. I ran on for a couple of miles and started to get a little weirded out from the crushing blackness. It was like sensory deprivation with an awesome sound track. The fact that Rush’s 2112 had started playing on my iPod didn’t help ease my sense of foreboding.

Normally I like being in the park, but I was getting anxious to be back in civilization, basically because I’m about as brave as Scooby and Shaggy facing a haunted house when Thelma has run all out of Scooby Snacks.

By my swallowed-by-the-night reckoning I still had a mile left when nature called. Another convenient thing about the park is that I get to do what hundreds of dogs do there everyday, as long as no one is looking.

But something was looking; many somethings.

I stopped and turned off to the side of the path to face a wooded area and began to whiz. Then my headlamp illuminated them: eyes; lots and lots of eyes. Well, probably only about eight or ten eyes, but it still scared the crap out me.

Correction: it scared the piss out of me.

I tried my best to kegel and tuck things away to high-tail it out of there like Tiger Woods running from a process server holding a paternity suit, but I felt dribbles of warmth mix uncomfortably with the sweat in my running pants. It was not a pleasant feeling, and was reminiscent of second-grade art class with the evil teacher who didn’t believe me when I said I couldn’t hold it.

Also not pleasant was that I was convinced I was about to become food for something else.

Before you start thinking I am a completely spastic loser for being afraid of a few coyotes, I need to relay a tale of childhood trauma. When I was seven-years-old I lived in a small town with only one theatre. One night my parents ditched me and my older sister at the movies so they could do whatever grown ups do when the kids are otherwise occupied.

The only movie playing was Jaws.

Now remember, I was seven, and the fact that I was in the middle of nowhere British Columbia held no sway in formulating the opinion that a great white death fish was going to sneak into my bedroom at night and eat me just like it did the fat sea captain.

A few months later my wretchedly selfish parents ditched my sister and I at the theatre again, and this time the movie was the lesser-known Grizzly. To this day I can remember the tagline: “18 feet of gut-crunching, man-eating terror!”

If I was freaked out about some stupid fish, imagine how terrified I was at the very real possibility of being eaten by a bear. You know, because I lived in bear country, and my dad had a bear skin rug lying on the living room floor skinned from a critter he’d shot, and one of the bear’s brethren might want to get revenge for that kind of thing on someone’s only son.

I was miffed at my parents for quite a while about that, but then they paid for university, so we’ll call it even.

The thing is, those early experiences gave me a fear of being eaten and the fact that the typical coyote only comes up to my knee didn’t quite register at that moment. I feared that I was going to slip and suffer a compound fracture and they’d smell blood and go in for the kill and the next day some guy walking his dog would find something that looked like it was from the opening scene in an episode of CSI.

That last mile out of the park might have been a personal best.

Once back in the safety of suburbia’s slippery sidewalks and SUV swarms I felt much calmer. I ran the rest of the way back to my kids’ dojo, feeling like an idiot.

I felt something else too: I still had to pee.