I love running down by the beach, I live really close to Lake Michigan. And earlier this week I went and ran some stairs. Did some plyometrics, the usual and I brought a book with me too ‘cus I figured I don’t know, maybe when I’m done I can just get some reading done. A little windy, a little breezy, a little cool, so I actually finished my workout and just read in my car for a while, while I watched some storm clouds move over the lake and it’s been so mild lately and it was in the middle of the afternoon. I was like, you know what? I’m here for it, I want to see like a light rainstorm come over — come over the Great Lake. And it’ll be peaceful, had my windows down. And it was peaceful, until it wasn’t. Hail began to fall, which fine we get hail from time to time. But then I realized the hail was bigger than typical and I started to panic a little bit.
It’s gonna sound dramatic but it sounded like the hail was shattering my windows as it was falling and to be sure, it wasn’t, but it just sounded like it. Every single piece that fell felt like it was denting or damaging my car and it happened so fast that I didn’t panic, but I had to move quickly. I quickly turned my car on and I had to get out so fast I didn’t even put my seat belt on and I never drive without a seat belt. I sped out of the beach parking lot, sped up out of the beach road, apologies, but I was probably doing 60 plus on a road that’s like 30 miles per hour because it felt like the hail was ripping my car to shreds, every piece that fell did not splat, it crashed against my car. I sped up about a mile and a half until I found a highway overpass and I hid underneath the overpass with probably seven other cars as the hailstorm worked its way through.
I was trying to think of the perfect size after the storm subsided, of the pieces of hail and it’s such like a ‘tweener. Not as big as a meatball but just a little bit smaller than a meatball, which is pretty substantial for Michigan. I think maybe the biggest hailstorm I’ve ever been caught in, with my car. And I don’t mean to oversell, I have pictures of the hail that I can share and you guys, if anyone looks at the photos, you can come up with your own size equivalent. I couldn’t think of it, like a big marble, not the small marbles, but the big ones, maybe that’s it? And I also picked them up a few minutes after the storm had totally ended. So they had shrunk a little bit, by the time I got to them.
My dad told me later, that usually hail needs to be closer to the size of a baseball to do damage and they were nowhere close to that size. So I’m grateful for that, but definitely a harrowing experience and it was big enough, the hail itself, that after the storm passed, I drove back down to the beach and the road was just littered with leaves and shards of leaves, because the hail had just shredded up the trees as it came through. It was pretty fascinating actually and it’s also why, the first place I tried to stop under a tree overhang did not help me at all because the hail just blasted right through the tree. And so I had to get out of there and then speed up to the overpass. So fun times there.