Most appalling thing I've ever witnessed at a race

Today I ran a 15K race, or at least I was there, wore a number and made it from the start line to the finish line. But I don't really want to talk about my race. I'd like to talk about something I witnessed on the race course.

I was running along a little over 3 miles in up a slight hill. By then the runners were fairly spaced out so there was plenty of room for everyone. Up the hill a little ways I noticed two guys sort of veered out into the road while one of them was sort of going after the other guy. For a minute I thought that maybe they were old friends and the guy up front was surprised to see him. Then it became very apparent that they certainly were not friends. The first guy, who we'll call Psycho just to make it easier, suddenly started throwing punches at the other guy, we'll call him Bob. Psycho keeps going after Bob, throwing some punches and a few kicks while Bob was just kind of trying to block the blows and stay out of his reach. It didn't appear that any of the blows connected well enough to do any real damage, but I can definitely tell you that with the way that Psycho wound up and threw them they certainly would have if they had hit him just right. And Psycho just wouldn't let it go. Everyone who ran by would yell something like, hey, calm down! Which he would... for about 5 seconds until he'd go after Bob again and throw a few more futile punches. I kept looking back and Psycho was still at it. Finally we reached a turn and I lost sight of them, but I just couldn't figure out what the heck was going on.

At one point about the only thing I could make out was Psycho saying something about Bob being a "backdoor runner" whatever that is supposed to mean. Bob had passed me recently, and although admittedly he was one of those guys who groans loudly with every exhale of breath, I certainly never felt like punching him. And really, I don't care how many times someone steps on your heels, they don't deserve to get punched.

Now let's put this in perspective a little more. This is a race that had about 300 runners. It cost $12 to enter. At that point in the race we were all averaging right about 8:00/mile. What that means is that none of us were anywhere near winning any prize of any kind, and there was absolutely nothing at stake. Even if we were in position to win something, the race director had announced at the beginning of the race that the prizes this year were umbrellas. Is it worth punching someone over an umbrella? I don't think so. It just blows my mind that someone would start throwing punches at someone in the middle of a local running race.

I don't know what happened to Psycho, but I do regret not taking note of his number. The good news is that a couple of miles later I heard that groaning exhaling again and Bob had caught up, still running along. I asked him if he was ok, and he just smiled and said, "oh, yeah," and seemed totally unfazed, so I'm guessing Psycho didn't hurt him and he was obviously well aware of how ridiculous the situation was.

People amaze me every day, and it is definitely not always in a good way.