What Side Of The Road Do You Run On? This story starts with a little argument that broke out on a run last weekend. It wasn’t a fight between my running partners and me – although that happens at times. This one broke out between me and a driver.

The more that you run, the more you’ll run into people that dislike the fact that you’re on their roads it seems.

Anyway, three of us were running along the side of a very windy, narrow road in Folsom. This is a fairly typical road for Folsom in that the bushes come right down to the edge of the road next to the white lines. There is obviously no sidewalk on the road at this point, so we were running single-file down the white line when a car came up upon us.

Let me just repeat that we were really running single-file on the white line – and I’m not making that up. Surprisingly, we weren’t spread out all over the road like we might normally be. We were actually behaving.

The driver came upon us and brought her car to a screeching halt. She rolled down her window and said quite rudely, “you’re running on the wrong side of the road!” To which I replied quite calmly, “no ma’am, we’re actually supposed to be on this side of the road.” And just like you’d expect, as she starting rolling up her window, her voice could be heard, now somewhat muffled, yelling “NO YOU’RE NOT!”

This is sort of typical behavior from drivers when you’re on THEIR roads, but what concerned me is whether we really were on the wrong side of the road. See, I had this happen in a similar way last Summer when a driver yelled at me in just the same manner, but we were on the OTHER side of the road.

All jokes about runners crossing the road aside, I really wanted to settle this one: which side of the road are we supposed to be on anyway? And not only answer it, I wanted to be SURE that I knew the answer, so that I could yell back something like “Look it up” next time with some sense of confidence.

So I looked it up.

I actually spent a couple of hours looking it up, because I wanted to be so sure. Here’s what I found out: generally speaking, runners should be on the LEFT side of the road, facing traffic, when there is no sidewalk.

That’s what I thought too. (And that’s where we were.)  Anyhow, input?