The author (right) with her friend and running partner Holly Wheeler in January 2022.

I called my boyfriend and told him what had happened. I didn’t tell him in person because we lived 1,000 miles apart and were rarely in the same room.

The incident had involved a man riding his bike with his pants pulled down around his ass, hissing at me, “You want some of this?”

It was quite a feat of balance, I thought in the split second before I realised he was a threat, stalking me in the black morning when I was just trying to go for a run.

I called the police, who took down a report. My boyfriend said he was sorry it had happened, and we both laughed at my description of the flasher’s pale butt glowing under the streetlight.

We were nearly a year into our relationship by then, which began not long after I ended my 19-year marriage, when my post-divorce emotions were at their rawest. When we met, I immediately opened up to him about who I was and what I wanted from life and a relationship. I probably should have sworn off men for a while so I could reflect on why my marriage failed, but instead, I was pushing forward.

I refused to let a creepy stranger dictate when I could leave my house, so I kept running in the dark, but now it was different. Every time I shifted my gaze to avoid tripping, my headlamp cast a hard shadow that looked like the man, ready to pounce. He was everywhere.

When my boyfriend came to visit the following weekend, we ran together, and I felt safe again. He was tall and fit and never worried about being stalked. I hated that I felt safer with him just because he was a man while the source of my fear was also a man – how men had on-off power over my sense of security.

After my boyfriend flew back home, the creeper reemerged, this time riding his bike past my house in broad daylight and then U-turning to look directly into my kitchen window. I called the police, and they dispatched an officer to search the area.

That was the first time I got a good look at him: hooded eyes, black hair, skin drawn tight around his jaw. He looked anxious, which was scary, like he wasn’t in control of his own actions. If you saw his mug shot, you might say he looked like a serial killer.

The detective assigned to the case told me the man’s name. He had a history of exposing himself to women and lived a few blocks away on my own street, but no one had caught him in the act so they couldn’t arrest him. A woman a few blocks over had nicknamed him the penis pedaler.

“That’s awful,” my boyfriend said on the phone later. “I wish I could be there for you.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” But I was kidding myself.

As soon as the sun went down, I double-checked every window and door lock. Armed with pepper spray, I looked under beds and........

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