One thing I would never get accustomed to, though, was the noise. An unceasing din of jabbering, sneezing, shouting, coughing, laughing, nose blowing, farting, arguing, throat clearing, singing, and burping—punctuated with jarring loudspeaker announcements and sudden high-pitched screams—came from all directions at all times of day and night. To never be free of it was torture. Several well-meaning friends sent me books about meditation, and every exercise started with “First, find a quiet spot to sit, where you can relax.” I had to laugh. There was no such place.
On Saturday, May 14, I “celebrated” my official three-month anniversary in prison with an early-morning fourteen-mile run on the track. I needed to burn off nervous energy: I had a weekend full of visitors lined up. My mother was coming that afternoon for her first visit, and Pam and Kevin, who had already been here once, were coming on Sunday. As much as I wanted and needed to see the people I loved, visits were stressful. I tried not to think too much about the outside world; it was the only way to get through the day. Visitors disturbed the manageable orderliness of my routine—and more than that, when they headed for the exit and I headed back to my cell, I was forced to confront once more the reality of my situation. They go. I stay.
My mother could no longer drive, so she enlisted a close friend to bring her to Beckley. When my name was called for visitation, I nearly sprinted to the inmate entrance. After a quick frisk by the CO on duty, I stepped into the room and spotted Mom and her friend, Kimberly, sitting in two chairs. Mom beamed as I walked forward with my arms reaching out to her. I hugged her and felt her tininess. She squeezed me hard. When I had talked to her on the phone, it had been hard to gauge how she was doing. She often rambled or sounded confused. I knew in that instant that whatever Alzheimer’s had taken, the essence of my mother was still alive.
We were allowed to hug visitors twice, once upon their arrival and once when they were leaving. Other than that, there could be no contact. I so badly wanted to reach out and hold my mother’s hand as I sat across from her. We talked about her animals, and she asked me about the food and if I was sleeping well and how my knee was feeling. I told her I was doing okay.
“I think about Attica a lot,” she said. “Do you remember that? Being there?”
“I remember those cinnamon rolls you used to bring me from the bakery downstairs.”
She and Kimberly stayed until visiting hours ended at 3:00 p.m. When they left, I went back to my cell and buried my face in my pillow. Crying is not advisable in prison, but the tears would not stop. I gave in to them for several minutes, then fell into a fitful sleep that lasted until the screech of the loudspeaker announcing the 4:00 p.m. count.
On Sunday morning, I went for another long run and then waited anxiously for Pam and Kevin to arrive. The visitation room was already loud with friends, families, and girlfriends—many of whom had likely been making the trip to Beckley for years. Kevin seemed taller, and his hair had grown in the six weeks since his last visit. Though he was technically a junior, he had already earned his diploma through a school for gifted students called the Early College at Guilford and was now taking college courses at Guilford College. I had discovered the school when they had invited me to speak there about Running the Sahara.
Unfortunately, Brett was not doing so well. Things had been difficult for him since UNC Greensboro had suspended him for a year, a penalty that seemed incredibly harsh to me for a first offense. Pam told me he was “floundering.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I think he’s doing heroin,” she said quietly. “Shooting up.”
“No way! Not Brett. He’s afraid of needles.”
“I think he is.” She looked stricken. “Coke, too.”
I felt as if I might implode from grief. I had brought this on; I should have been out there helping him fight it.
“Maybe we could get him into a treatment center,” I said.
Pam teared up. Of course, with me in prison, there was no way to pay for that.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “For not being there.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Pam said. “Nordlander did this to you.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kevin said.
I felt him shaking when I hugged him good-bye. “I love you, Dad. I’m sorry for what you are going through.”
I held him a few seconds longer. “I love you, too.”
I don’t think I had ever said good-bye to either Brett or Kevin without saying I love you. Maybe saying it so much diluted the impact of those words, but at that moment they had great power.
I walked back to my housing unit. I could still feel Kevin’s hug, and it dawned on me that maybe the toughest part about being in prison was the absence of physical contact. The deprivation of touch coupled with the complete lack of positive reinforcement of any kind turned already damaged men into emotionless shells. I knew one guy, Dwight, who had been down for nearly ten years and had never had a visitor. Imprisoned when he was nineteen, he had now gone almost a decade without a touch from a loving human being. That would have been a death sentence for me.
- - - -
Not long after my visits from Mom, Pam, and Kevin, something amazing happened at Beckley federal prison. Correctional Officer Johnny Whacker disappeared. Nobody knew why, though there were plenty of rumors. One was that was he caught having sex with a married female CO. Another was that the stack of complaints and lawsuits filed by inmates against Whacker could no longer be ignored, even by the Bureau of Prisons. Most likely, though, he was promoted and shipped to a new prison, where he would have a fresh crop of inmates to torment.
My new counselor, Mr. Painter, was a fifteen-year veteran in the system, and from the moment we met, I could tell he would be the opposite of Whacker. He was pleasant and polite when I went to see him to request a change of cell. I had become friends with a twenty-three-year-old inmate named Cody, who worked out like a maniac in the yard every day. We had arrived at Beckley on the same day, though he had already served nearly a year in a county jail. Cody had nine years to go on his sentence for conspiracy to sell marijuana, though he swore he had only been a customer. His cellie was being discharged, and he asked me if I wanted to take over the empty bunk.
Painter approved my request on the spot, so I decided to push my luck and ask him if I might also be able to move to a job in the rec department. He said it was fine with him. I moved in with Cody the next day and started my job—cleaning the pool-table room, and teaching classes such as “Weight Loss and Obesity,” “Dealing with Diabetes,” and my favorite, “Overcoming Addiction.” In a prison filled with drug offenders, I didn’t know how much of an impact I could have. I hoped I could reach a couple of guys and show them that they had options in life other than drinking and drugging, that a sober life was possible and had benefits. But in truth, I needed to talk about sobriety and the 12 steps and to tell my story to others because it kept me sober and sane. It was the closest I got to an AA meeting.
Now that I was running again, I yearned for a goal, something to keep me motivated and help me stop obsessing about Brett and my mother and my case—all the things that were agonizingly out of my control. But Beckley had no races on the rec schedule, no training groups to join. In fact, any kind of organized exercise was technically prohibited. I suppose the worry was that in case of trouble, the guards would rather deal with fat and out-of-shape inmates.
As the days got warmer and longer, I found myself daydreaming about Badwater. In years past, in late May I would be maxing out my training for that race—going for runs of twenty-five or thirty-five miles in the Greensboro heat wearing five layers of clothing, to simulate Death Valley. It seemed as if every running magazine I was sent had a story about Badwater; I lay on my bunk reading and fuming, picturing my friends happily pounding out miles in preparation. It killed me to think I would be in this dump when they were on the starting line at Badwater Bas
in. I ached for it, that beautiful struggle, that incandescent pain.
One afternoon after reading yet another article about Badwater in Runner’s World magazine, I went out to the track feeling pissed off and sorry for myself. My mother was deteriorating, my son was off the rails, and though Howell was working as fast as he could, my appeal wouldn’t be ready to file for weeks. I stretched and started to run.
The smokers were out, as usual, and the basketball courts were full. Inmates were playing horseshoes and bocce, and sitting in the bleachers staring straight ahead. I heard the wind rattling the tops of trees when I rounded the far corner by the woods, and then on the straightaway the sun hit my face. I had been reading The Star Rover by Jack London, about a prisoner serving a life sentence who took fantastic journeys to other lives and other places simply by imagining them. I liked this idea of inner mobility—that no matter what fences you were behind, no matter how limited your movement, you could travel anywhere freely in your mind.
The sun was warm and I allowed myself to pretend it was a Death Valley sun, that I was breathing Death Valley air. Then I was on Badwater Road. I saw the white salt pan near Furnace Creek and the arrowweed clumps at the Devil’s Cornfield; I saw the old wooden wagon in front of the Stovepipe Wells General Store; I saw the red-rock gash of Rainbow Canyon and the old gas station in Keller. I saw the strange, potato-shaped boulders of the Alabama Hills and the gray-stone teeth of Mount Whitney.
Maybe if we rushed with my appeal, I’d be out of here by mid-July. Maybe I could get special permission to be a last-minute Badwater entrant. I pictured myself surprising everyone—Ulrich, Reed, Smith-Batchen, Gingerich, Lopez, Farinazzo—as I walked casually up to the start.
I stopped running. Shit! You’re an idiot, Engle. I wasn’t getting out in time to run Badwater. I was going to miss it this year and maybe next year, too. That was a fact.
I had an idea.
What if I ran Badwater here on this gravel track? I did the math; I’d have to do 540 laps to match Badwater’s 135-mile course. It would require about twenty-four total hours of running over two days. Even with stopping for head counts, I thought I could do it. Unless there was fog; when fog enveloped Beckley, the guards got twitchy, as if we might all just walk out into the murk and disappear. Fog counts were more frequent; movement was restricted. But if I got lucky with the weather, and if I could keep the snitches from reporting me, and if my knee held up, I was absolutely going to run Badwater this year. I’d be twenty-three hundred miles from the actual start on July 13, but I’d be toeing a line of my own.
CHAPTER 13
. . . what is there in a storm that moves me so? Why am I so much better and stronger and more certain of life when a storm is passing? I do not know, and still, I love a storm more, far more, than anything. . . .
—KHALIL GIBRAN
I told no one about my plan. This was for me. To keep my sanity, I would do the insane; it had always worked before. Deciding to run Badwater sparked a feeling of purpose in me that I had not felt since I arrived at Beckley. I had been in survival mode. But now I knew I had to do more than simply get through this. Fair or unfair, I would probably be in federal prison for at least another year. There was no point in wasting time wishing for a different outcome.
I signed up for classes in everything from blood-borne pathogens to parenting. I read classic novels—A Farewell to Arms, Travels with Charley—and then took tests to get credit for the reading. I piled up dozens of academic certificates of recognition, which I had been told might help me get an early release date. I dedicated two hours every day to writing in my journal. I even joined Toastmasters and told stories to a packed house about my adventures. The more things I signed up for and the busier I was, the better I felt.
I reached out to Ray Zahab, my Sahara teammate, who had stood by me since my arrest, and asked him to send me some workout plans. We had no weights to use, so I had been relying on pull-ups and push-ups. Now I needed more. Right away, Ray sent me detailed running programs to build endurance and body-weight exercises that would help build muscle.
My change in attitude and my commitment to getting stronger and faster did not go unnoticed. Guys started sidling up to me in the yard or in the chow line to ask for advice about running, exercise, and diet.
“How many miles you do today, Running Man?” they’d ask, and I’d tell them ten or twenty or thirty.
Their eyes would get big. “Damn,” they’d say. “How do I get started?”
They saw me doing it; they wanted to do it, too. Within a few weeks, I was working out with half a dozen guys every day. Sometimes I ran with them, sometimes I gave them a plan and waited for them to come tell me excitedly about the eight-minute mile they had just run or how far they had gone over the weekend. We used rocks and horseshoes for weights, did dips on the picnic tables and pull-ups under the bleachers.
I also fielded lots of questions about diet and weight loss. Being a vegetarian in prison was like being a whore in church. Everybody looked at you funny, casting some judgment, but they all wanted to ask you questions in private. I didn’t try to push guys toward vegetarianism—but I did get some of them to stop eating biscuits and gravy for breakfast every morning.
Not everyone who came out to exercise with me stuck with it. Some wanted results but didn’t want to do the work. Some couldn’t keep to the schedule and drifted away. Some probably decided I was just too batshit crazy. But the handful of men who stayed were committed, and they understood the importance of working together.
Butterbean was one of the regulars. A friendly guy, he loved basketball, had a teenage son, and weighed 310 pounds when I met him. Adam was a six-foot-five-inch, red-faced, heavy-breathing giant who weighed 437 pounds when he asked me if I could help him. With some encouragement, he started walking. Every day, he clocked five miles—more than I wanted him to do, but once he got momentum, there was no stopping him.
Dave was the only Jew in Beckley, and I joked with him that I let him in the group only because he could get matzo in the commissary, the key ingredient to a good prison-block pizza. Short, balding, with an impressive potbelly, Dave was chronically late and complained daily about how difficult the workouts were.
One day I’d had enough: “Go the hell away with your bad attitude. We don’t need you here bitching and moaning.”
He was shocked, but knew that I meant it. Later, I took him aside and told him he was welcome to rejoin the workout group if he kept his mouth shut and actually did the exercises. To my great surprise, he showed up the next day and never missed another session.
Block called himself our token black guy. I had noticed him standing nearby while I worked out one day. Since I had never seen him before, I assumed he was a transfer from another prison or maybe from the in-house drug program. He was obviously in great shape.
“You want to join us?” I asked.
“Sure.”
That was it. No small talk, no questions. Block was in.
Our ragtag group got together almost every day. We pushed each other and got stronger—and the guys who needed to lose weight started melting away pounds. And week after week, I ramped up my own mileage and speed. I also started doing yoga, something that had helped me avoid injuries in the past. One afternoon, I decided to risk the smokers’ ridicule, and I walked out onto the softball field inside the track. I took off my shoes and socks and started my yoga routine. I started with a standing breathing exercise. From there I went into half-moon, then the eagle pose. It felt good to be stretching and balancing. I made it all the way to triangle pose before I heard Shorty’s deep voice behind me.
“You look like a damn pretzel.” He laughed. “You better be careful or you’re gonna get stuck like that.”
“Why don’t you come on out here and try it?”
“I’m almost seven feet tall. You look silly, but I would look downright stupid.”
When I finished with my routine, I put on my socks and shoes and headed for the unit for 4:00 p.m. count. That evening, three guys came up at different times to ask me if I would let them know next time I was doing yoga. They wanted to try it. I didn’t expect that. Beckley was full of surprises.
- - - -
One day in mid-June, a major shakedown occurred at the camp. That meant that everyone had to vacate the housing unit. The rumor in the yard was that guards had been tipped off about some cell phones. Phones were strictly prohibited, and anyone caught with one got a year added to his sentence. The shakedown was followed immediately by a lockdown; we were stuck inside the unit until further notice. The timing was lousy. I had a fifteen-mile, hard-tempo run planned for that afternoon. Now I couldn’t do it. I paced back and forth in my cell, did some push-ups and sit-ups, and hoped the yard would open again soon.
We were allowed to go to dinner but had to report back to our cells immediately after. The compound, we were informed, would not open again for two days. As I walked back to Evergreen, I remembered a letter I had received from my friend Justin not long after my arrival at Beckley. He was a strong runner and triathlete, but he was also a numbers nerd. He had calculated for me how long a person had to run in place to cover the equivalent of a mile. He called it a SWAG—Scientific Wild-Assed Guess—but he felt it was pretty accurate. I looked through my old letters and found his detailed report.
If I did 674 steps, lifting each foot six inches off the ground, for eight minutes, Justin had written, I would have done a virtual mile. I asked Cody if it would bother him if I ran in place in the cell for a while. He laughed and said no, but that he would go find someone less weird to talk to. I spent the next two hours running in place next to my bunk. By the time I was done, a shallow pool of sweat had collected on the linoleum floor. By Justin’s calculations, I had run more than fifteen miles, going absolutely nowhere. It was one of the hardest workouts I had ever done.
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