Banana peels stalk me when I run

My life, in one picture.

They're back.

Today, after well over a year of banana-peel free running, I saw my first on-run fresh banana peel. It was on a route I did not map beforehand, a route that existed only in my head until the moment I set out on it. And it was, moreover, on a route I have only started running recently. Still, when I saw the first one, I was in good enough spirits to laugh. But the second one, mere steps later, made me scream (all of this surely to the great amusement--or fear--of anyone within earshot of me). For that was when I knew that the banana peels had returned to stalk me, after a long reprieve.

Let me explain. 
 
Like most runners, I’ve always enjoyed bananas. And like anyone raised on slapstick, I enjoy the comedic value of a banana peel. So I laughed when peels first started materializing on my runs sometime in high school (February 21, 2011 was the first recorded instance). How amusing it would be, I thought, to slip on one: like something Curley would try on Mo. But starting Easter 2013, things got weird. For on that crisp, sunny spring morning, I went for a long run around my hometown of Cincinnati. Just outside a packed church parking lot, I spotted a peel. I laughed. A few miles later, another appeared. I laughed, but less heartily. Then another, and another, and another until, by the run’s end, I had seen 13. 

The day of peak banana (link here)

For a long time, starting on that fruitful day, I would see banana peels on about a fifth of all my runs, on all kinds of roads, at various times of day, and in four different cities. They'd appear on routes which I run alone, and even on courses I’d only chosen once my runs began. Though only I knew where I’d be in a few miles, the banana peels somehow anticipated my arrival.

A change of season and scenery did not stop this. On my second day in Washington, D.C. for a summer internship in 2013, I went for a short run. With less than a mile to go, I spotted a peel on a sidewalk curb. (And frequently in the time following). In early July, moreover, I returned to Cincinnati for a short vacation. After returning from the airport, I went for a run, hoping the sudden change in locale would secure me. And after four miles, I thought it had. Yet these thoughts had scarcely begun when my feet found one of the fateful fruit upon the ground. Nowhere was safe, as a sighting the next day (my 20th birthday) confirmed. Not even trips of which none but my closest friends and family knew could shake off the peels.

You try sleeping at night when one of these is following you around

Fearing for my safety, and vaguely paranoid about some banana-based conspiracy, I began relating these incidents to the world through Facebook. If I were to perish by plantain, I thought, at least those who cared about me would know how, if not why. But this backfired. For not only did my besieging by banana continue, but it also spread to friends and family. “This week, Mon-Wed I saw a banana peel on each of my runs. Thought I'd let you know,” a fellow college runner I knew from high school reported. "encountered 2 banana peels within about a mile of one another on my run today. FYI," said another such friend. “Dad wanted me to tell you that today he was finishing up his long bike ride and looked down and saw a banana peel right by the Deerfield Kroger,” my sister informed me. And the one time I invited a teammate to run with me in D.C., a peel appeared on the first mile of our run. At last, I had a witness. It was the first peel he had ever seen while running. But I had long ago lost count.

My summer banana witness and I, traumatized after our banana encounter.

What could explain these incidents? At first, I thought my tendency to look at the ground while running caused me to perceive the banana-filled Mario Kart course that, apparently, is the running world, while the rest of my forward-focused peers remained ignorant of it. But the testimony of some other runners, including some who shared my earthward eye, suggested not. “You have to make this stuff up,” said a high school teammate. “I’m not even sure if I've ever seen a banana peel on the ground in my life.” Aside from the few intimates who had begun to share my curse, it seemed, the rest of my running community remained largely spared. So maybe I was just running in or near places—road race courses, dumpsters, restaurants—that featured a lot of food refuse. Yet when I varied my milieu away from these probable hotspots and still couldn’t escape the peels, this theory too proved untenable.

My surreal experiences with banana peels had clearly passed beyond the realm of reason. But I was still desperate for answers. My teammate and summer witness identified a banana-themed user of running2win and suggested he could be the culprit. I thought that maybe the bananas themselves were to blame. I did eat a lot of them; perhaps they did not take kindly to mass slaughter. A month-long break from bananas in D.C. during which peels also disappeared from my runs lent credence to this theory,  as did the reappearance of two the morning after I decided to break this hiatus, but then the pattern muddied again. And my father suggested that some advanced future simian civilization had identified me as a threat to its impending dominance, and thus sought to prevent me from existing in the future using time-traveling bananas: a combination of Planet of the Apes and The Terminator. And a friend of mine said that I was the one treating the bananas poorly:

Jack, I can't help but think that you're simply misunderstanding their intentions. Have you ever talked to a banana peel? Most of them are actually quite friendly. In fact, the majority of them bravely served their country in the Vietnana War; it's tragic story because most of them came back as mere slippery shells of what they once were. I think the ones that you're seeing are just trying to raise awareness in Washington for veterans of Vietnan.

Next time you see one please sit down next to it and ask it how it's doing. They're the silent type but they really love it when people talk to them. Who knows, maybe you'll even get an old war story out of one.

One of these theories could be true, or all of them, or none of them. I just didn’t know.

The banana sightings continued after I returned from DC in 2013. During the fall cross country season, a teammate had his first-ever sighting on a run with me. In the spring of 2014, I watched a TV show that posited the existence of banana-shaped UFOs, and considered my life potentially complete. I began the summer of 2014, spent mostly in California, without any banana sightings. But then I saw one on my first run upon returning to the Midwest (for a friend's wedding). And a week after that, I got my first California banana peel. And when I returned to Ohio after a summer in California, possibly the most bizarre banana-based incident of all occurred. Here is my description of the incident just after it happened:

Today, I ran one of my favorite routes: 10 miles of mostly grass and dirt trails in and around a nice local park. After I finished my run and was driving away, I started eating the banana I had brought with me. Briefly, I considered throwing it out the window, but thought it would be bad karma. So I kept it in the car, and started thinking about time travel for some reason. And while my mind was on this subject as I drove, the driver of a car on other side of the road threw a banana peel out his window; the peel landed exactly where I had been running 20 MINUTES EARLIER.

After that, however, the sightings dropped off significantly; I saw few, if any, from my senior year of college through my first nine months back Washington, D.C., now with a full-time job, despite running many of the same routes I did the last time I was here. The bananas disappeared with as little explanation as they appeared in the first place. Until, of course, they reappeared today, again, inexplicably. I may never know why banana peels stalk me. 

But I have a theory: They're meant as a sign that running has made me go bananas. For ever since I started taking running seriously, I’ve done some pretty crazy things to my body, things I never thought I could survive, much less gain from. And yet I persist, finding my limits and breaking through them as part of a process that, ideally, will last my whole life. If it’s rational to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, then runners are some of the world’s least rational people. And I’m one of them.

I may never truly know why I’m so prone to perceiving peels, or who, if anyone (or anything), is responsible. So I’ll just keep running. And every time I spot a banana peel, I’ll laugh, make sure not to slip, and then thank whoever put it there for reminding me that running made me go bananas. And if you see one unexpectedly, while running or doing anything else, think of me and do the same. 

Me, going bananas (credit Emmaline Epperson).