What Are the Odds of Getting Assaulted While Running?

For all trailrunners' worries about mountain lions and other critters, the scariest animal we're likely to meet is (drum roll) an ill-intentioned human - but how likely is that? Since in the U.S. we just set the clocks back an hour, after-work runs are going to be in the dark until March. So, Science Based Running tries to calculate the odds. The answer is we still don't know, because crime stats aren't collected that way. That said, violent crime in the U.S. is about as low as it's ever been.

Here are safety tips for running at night, and here's a mapping site that plots crimes by type over the last six months.