Runner starts filming after sensing a stranger might be following her: ‘A woman’s intuition is rarely wrong!’
One TikToker is sharing a valuable reminder with other women after an eerie situation at the park made her fear for her life.
According to Lacie (@lacie_kraatz), she was recently out for a run when she noticed some suspicious behavior from a fellow runner. Worried that it might be more than just her imagination, she pulled out her phone and hit record.
“Hello. I’m just making this video so that women are a little more aware of them,” the young woman begins. “See this gentleman behind me? Yeah, this is what this video’s about.”
In the clip, Lacie appears to be walking on a flat trail at a local park. Judging by her surroundings, there are other people nearby, and she’s running in broad daylight, which is exactly what she’s supposed to do when going for a run. But as she starts to explain, there’s something about the man walking behind her in the distance that made her uneasy.
Initially, the two passed each other while running in opposite directions. But at some point after seeing Lacie, the man stopped in the middle of the trail, waited for her to pass and then began running the other way so that now he was behind her.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking — ‘Why are you suspecting that he’s following you?'” Lacie continues. “Well, let me tell you. I was just walking like this, and I look up, and he’s in front of me, and he just keeps doing a ‘peek’ like this behind him, over and over again.”
Feeling uncomfortable, Lacie even tried to go a different way on the trail just to give the man the benefit of the doubt. At one point, she also came to a crosswalk and took off running when the “do not walk” sign was still up. She’d hoped she could get a good distance ahead of the man, but when she glanced over her shoulder, she noticed that he was “speeding” to catch up with her.
While filming, she once again starts to run, just to see if the man would start running, too.
Lo and behold, he does.
And while the video eventually ends with the man off in the distance, Lacie can still tell that he’s looking at her for no apparent reason.
“I couldn’t even finish my run,” the TikToker shares. “I only ran like a mile and a half. I wanted to do 3 miles, but no — creepy men just had to be creepy f****** men today.”
In the comments, countless women empathized with what she had gone through.
“a woman’s intuition is RARELY wrong!!” wrote one viewer.
“the fact that you were so calm shows how messed up society is – like we now expect this type of behavior,” another person lamented.
“Man, nothing pisses me off more than men who make me feel uncomfortable doing things that I NEED to do for my health and well-being,” someone else added.
Some women offered helpful hints and suggestions in case this ever happens again.
“Run to the police station they wont follow,” one person suggested, while another said a firehouse is also a safe zone.
“make sure he SEES you recording and yell. YELL. ‘i’m recording you!!'” someone else told her.
“What I do when I’m being followed is act feral,” yet another person shared. “Like I’ll bark and growl really loud and flail my arms around. If you look crazy your doin it right.”
Fellow runners also suggested changing up her running patterns from different routes to different times of day.
But most of all, they urged Lacie — and any other women who might be seeing this — not to let anyone make them feel uncomfortable like this when they’re out in the world.
“Girls we have got to normalize turning around and yelling at people following us,” one TikToker wrote. “Let them know you know, take pictures of them, scream, make a scene.”
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