by Peter Sagal
So, where once I was a runner who pointed my nose at the horizon, now I am one that sketches a dot-to-dot around the map, from restaurant restroom (God bless you, McDonald’s) to construction site porta-potty to grocery store. If I am anywhere within four miles of my home, I know where every public restroom is and what gyrations need to be accomplished to get to it, be it walking by a counter or daring the anger of a security guard. Here at the grocery store, nobody seemed to care. Larger institutions were often the best; since there were so many employees, it fell to no one to do anything about the sweaty, stressed bald man walking purposefully through the stockroom. Although, to be fair, the look on my face—a combination of determination, panic, and agony—was such that I don’t think anybody would dare mess with me.
Egress accomplished, emergency abated, I strolled more casually (but still purposefully, for camouflage purposes) back toward the exit. I hoped that every clerk was far too focused on refilling the dairy case to care about my walking in and out without buying anything, or my appearance, or my smell. I was right, at least this time. Once outside, I started running again, headed south, where I knew there was a twenty-four-hour Laundromat waiting, if necessary. Or, when.
Seven
I looked around the picnic tables, and only about half the audience looked back at me. The rest were staring into space or at the ground or somewhere I’m not even sure they knew. I kept talking anyway.
“So William and I were only about a hundred yards away when we heard a huge boom!”
Some of the kids flinched. Some of them marveled. A few of them grinned but still didn’t look at me. I didn’t worry they were bored. On this September night I was (once again) telling the story of the Boston Marathon, from five months earlier, and how William Greer had gutted out that last mile, possibly saving us from being caught in the terrorist bombing.
“I know he saved your life!” cried Luke, who was ten years old. “He knew the bomb was there! He just knew! And that’s why he ran! Because he knew!”
“You think so?” I asked.
“What’s a bomb?” asked Amar, nine.
Luke and Amar and all the other children around me, dressed in pale green knit shirts and light khaki shorts, were residents at the Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired, and they were gathered for their evening training run.
I had traveled to Baton Rouge for a Wait Wait show at the downtown performing arts center, one of about a dozen such trips I made each year, and as is often the case, I got an invitation to join some locals for a run. This time, though, the invitation came from Michelle Forte LeBlanc, owner of Fleet Feet Sports Baton Rouge, who asked me if I’d stop by the School for the Visually Impaired and talk to her running team. I had expected, when I came by toward dusk on this Wednesday evening, to meet a team of para-athletes who presumably traveled about the South and the country competing against other such athletes, and given that my own high school competitive career was not garlanded with laurels, I wasn’t sure I would have anything to offer them.
I was, as I often am, wrong in every particular. There was no organized team here, no uniforms. Most of the kids in front of me were young, preadolescent. Some of them didn’t even have sneakers. Bobby Simpson, the school’s director—and a former mayor of Baton Rouge—was here to run with us, and he told me there were about seventy kids studying at the school, about fifty of them in residence, sent from all over the state, ranging in age from toddlers up to kids who could legally drink, if they could find a way to a bar. From the look of the drab 1970s institutional buildings, the school didn’t have much money, and thus probably few extracurricular activities, and no sports to speak of. Looking up from the picnic table where I tried to field the kids’ questions, you could see the towering modern, multimillion-dollar Louisiana State University football stadium, an amusing irony lost on the many present who couldn’t in fact see it.
LeBlanc’s notion was that kids needed exercise and purpose and a goal, so she had given them one. She organized the first-ever Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired No Boundaries 5K, to be held on the campus in early October, to raise awareness of the school and its students, and these were the nineteen kids who were going to run it. Tonight we were going to do two training laps around the campus, for a total run of about two miles. “Are you all ready to run?” asked Michelle, once I had run out of answers to the kids’ infinite questions, and we all headed toward the driveway.
Luke, the kid who insisted that my friend William must have just known, somehow, about the bombs—because “he JUST DID”—immediately grabbed my hand. It was a little sudden, seeing as I had known him for all of seven minutes, but as had been explained to me, these kids live far from their families—assuming they have families. They can’t go anywhere on their own, and nobody comes to take them away, so I was the most exciting thing to happen to them all week. Maybe all month. Maybe since they got there.
“Okay, let’s go!” said one of the volunteers, and Luke shouted, “AAAAAAAAH!” and sprinted full out for twenty yards before he gasped and pleaded for a break. I kept encouraging him to pace himself, but moderation wasn’t in him. He was a switch with two settings, walking and AAAAAAAAAAAH! After guiding the way halfway around the campus and talking about many things with Luke, I decided to run ahead and spend some time with another group. As I jogged away, he shouted, “HEY! You’re not going to leave your kid behind, are you?”
Thanks, Luke.
Up ahead, two more volunteers were keeping a boy named Evan-Anthony company, if they could catch him. Evan-Anthony was by far the fastest runner of the bunch, although like Luke, he wasn’t very good at moderating his pace. Evan-Anthony liked to stop, get down in a sprinter’s starting stance, paw at the ground with one hand, growl like a tiger, and then take off. Evan-Anthony was five years old and had thick Coke-bottle glasses, through which he, too, seemed very happy to see me. Evan-Anthony’s world, like that of all five-year-olds, was very immediate and very concrete—that bush, that tree, that building—all of which he sped toward, growling and happy.
I managed to keep up with Evan-Anthony as we finished the second circuit of the campus, and then I decided to circle back, running the way I had come, finding a new group of runners and guides, and then running them to the finish before starting back again. Each time I jogged back alone through the darkening evening, I thought—as has been my habit of late—about my own troubles and woes, and then twenty or fifty or a hundred yards later I would fall in with a child who had a much more serious problem, and a much better attitude about it.
Here was Brandi, eight, who wanted to be a cheerleader some day, which would require, among other things, that she be able to leave this school and find one with an athletic program, a school that could accommodate her disability. She was here, running along with me, because no such school was available to her. And then Luke again, who either couldn’t see me in the dimming light or pretended not to, angry that I (too?) had abandoned him.
And then finally, the last runner of the pack, Lydia,I one of the few kids who was obviously, and completely, blind. She was walking carefully with her guide, who I volunteered to replace for this last half lap. Her eyes were sunken back in her head, only the whites showing. She was no bigger than an eleven- or twelve-year-old, but after a few minutes of conversation, it became apparent that she was older, much older—in fact, she was eighteen. She was very happy I had joined her, as she wanted to interview me for her current events project, and as we walked around the circumference of her world, her arm firmly holding my elbow, she asked me about running: when I started, why I did it, and what I got out of it.
It’s impossible if you talk about running not to eventually extol it as a cure for what ails you—your sedentary lifestyle, your twenty extra pounds, your depression, your anxieties—and as I walked along with Lydia, chatting about how through running I had managed to lose weight and gain energy, how I rarely caught colds, it occurred to me that my trials and my successes were all pissant lit
tle annoyances compared to what she endured as she woke every day to darkness.
I grew self-conscious and eventually asked her to tell me about herself. She has been blind since birth, she said, born four months premature. “Oh,” I said brightly, “you must have been really eager to get here!”
“No,” said Lydia, in a tone of patient correction. “I was a crack baby.”
We were about fifty feet from the finish, which was delineated by all the other students and volunteers who had walked, run, or, in Evan-Anthony’s case, growled around the campus two times and were now waiting for Lydia and me, the last two stragglers. I said to her, “Do you want to run?”
“How far is it?” she asked.
“Not far,” I said.
She grabbed my arm tighter, and I said, “Go!” And I and Lydia—old and young, thick and thin, sighted and blind, ran for the finish.
The race went off as scheduled two weeks later, with the students and their guides running the five kilometers around the school under stormy skies and each getting a medal. The Delta Gamma sorority at LSU, which volunteers at the school, came to cheer the kids as they ran. I hope Brandi, my young friend who aspired to be a cheerleader, heard them. I hope she joins them someday. I hope she ends up on top of a pyramid of cheerleaders, because from such a height, you can see everything.
* * *
I. Not her real name.
Eight
Like so much in life, filling a thousand cups with Gatorade is a matter of timing. Once you’ve got the cups arrayed in a tight rectangular matrix on the folding table, you need to fill each of them, not too much, which would make the cup too heavy and unstable to hand to a runner, and too difficult for her to swallow on the move without choking; and of course not too little, which would make the exchange of cup from volunteer to runner pointless, unless you think handing an exhausted, dehydrated person a near-empty cup is an amusing prank. As a rookie, you start by eyeballing the imaginary fill line, about a third up the side of the cup, but that becomes too cumbersome and eye-straining, so instead you start counting out the pour to time, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, before tipping up the pitcher and moving on to the next cup. Once you’ve got the hang of it, you skip the up and down, and just keep the pour going across the contact point between one cup’s rim and the next (which geometry tells us is a single infinitesimal point, although we must allow for the fact that cheap paper cups are not platonic circles), with a brief stop before moving on. As Norman Maclean said of fly-fishing, “It is an art performed on a four-count rhythm,” and as Norman Maclean also said, “All good things come by grace, and grace comes by art, and art does not come easy.”
I finished the last of the cups lined up across the width and breadth of the table. The high school girls I was working with on this table grabbed two thin cardboard sheets and placed them carefully over the filled cups, and we started to stack more cups for a second story. It was six in the morning, and we had hours, and many cups, to go.
I found myself here, early on a cool October Sunday morning in 2013 at the mile-18 rest stop of the Chicago Marathon, stacking and filling cups because of a little error I had made two years prior, almost to the day, back in the halcyon days when I did not volunteer at marathons, I just ran them, and I was a married man with three daughters whom I still read to at night. I woke up on the morning of October 9, 2011—my last morning as a decent human being—with what seemed a nifty notion. In a month I would be running the Philadelphia Marathon, and my training for this day called for a twenty-mile run at a brisk 7:30 pace. It just so happened that not far from my suburban home the Chicago Marathon would soon go off. Why not, I asked myself, jump on the course, run twenty miles with crowds and company, and step off the course right before the finish?
In running circles, a runner in an official race who has not paid the entrance fee or otherwise acquired an official bib or entrant number is known as a “bandit,” and the act of doing so is called “banditing.” To the forgiving, it is seen sometimes as a crime of convenience, as in “I didn’t have time/money to enter, so I just bandited it,” and sometimes even as an act of youthful rebellion, like jumping a subway turnstile or shoplifting from Neiman Marcus. For many years, there was a small subculture of runners who bandited the Boston Marathon each spring, starting about an hour after the official entrants had vanished down the road heading east from Hopkinton. They were tolerated in the same way that, in my youth, fans were allowed to run onto the field after a baseball team won a championship—as a kind of youthful exuberance, we’ll allow it, but make sure nobody gets hurt, okay?
Pretty much every runner has bandited a race once or twice, for a mile or eight. They’ll join a friend on the course for the last mile or the first; in fact, one of the runners at the finish line when the bomb went off in Boston in 2013 was shielded from injury by a relative who had jumped in to run with her to the finish; he took the shrapnel that would have hit her and the disabled daughter she was pushing in a wheelchair. My spontaneous notion to do it myself, on that October morning, was inspired by a friend who had paced someone for the last ten miles at the 2010 Chicago Marathon the year before, with no apparent ill effect to himself or the 45,000 registered runners including, that year, myself. In fact, in the six years prior to my own turn to the dark side, I’d run upward of fifty races, and each time I’d been a registered, honest runner with a bib. And in those races, the few bandits I knew about, and the many more I didn’t, caused me no concern. As of October 9, 2011, I was a banditing virgin, and like all virgins, I approached my first time with some excitement, a little apprehension, and no real appreciation of the complications that might ensue.
My plan went off without a hitch. I took the train to LaSalle Street and North Avenue, near the five-mile marker. I waited for the three-hour pace group to zip by, then jumped in, a bottle of Gatorade strapped to my hand and energy chews in my pocket. My plan to take or leave nothing didn’t quite work out: as the temperatures edged up into the seventies, I refilled my bottle twice from aid stations, and I did use one toilet along the route. Otherwise I bothered no one, as far as I could tell, and no one bothered me. I ran past the mile-17 aid station, waved to some of my friends who work it every year—they were surprised to see me—and arrived at mile 25, feeling pretty good about myself and my twenty-mile run. I slowed to a walk and headed to the side of the street where a policewoman raised the barrier tape for me to leave the course. I nodded in thanks. I believe she smiled. I strolled over to the Roosevelt Road L stop and hopped on the train home. If it was a crime, it was a perfect one.
Or, it would have been if I hadn’t blabbed.
For two months, I had been keeping a training diary on the Runner’s World website, in preparation for my attempt at a PR in Philly, and in the post I wrote later that day I didn’t think twice, or even once, about mentioning my twenty-miler as an unregistered Chicago Marathon runner. Reading the entry now, I wince at the feigned breeziness of my guilty conscience. I even smirkingly offered to send Bank of America (the principal marathon sponsor) a check for the Gatorade I drank, if anybody were to complain. I must have known, somehow, that I wouldn’t get away with it; the irony, of course, is that until I bragged about it, I had.
It was sometime the next day, Monday, when I first heard that comments were piling up on the blog post. And they were not praise for my admirably consistent pace in the twenty-miler. No, by the time the last of sixty-two comments had been posted, I’d been called a thief, a self-absorbed jerk, a loser, an idiot, an embarrassment to both my employer, NPR, and Runner’s World, and most cuttingly, a “minor celebrity.” I was scolded, threatened with violence—“Someone should smash him to the ground!”—and roundly condemned. One commenter laid out the case that banditing was the running equivalent of rape.
I had no idea that so many people thought of banditing a race as among the most mortal of sins, something that would place you in the deepest levels of Dante’s hell. My crime brought out the most indignan
t moralizing it has ever been my shame to receive, including a painstakingly handwritten letter from a mom who told me that my actions had completely contradicted her years-long quest to teach her sons to be thoughtful, honest, and good. I was the murderer of even the possibility of virtue in a fallen world.
After about a week, the flood of judgment subsided, the emails, blog comments, and handwritten letters stained with bitter tears stopped arriving, and I started looking forward to returning to obscurity. I hoped for the day when somebody might steal a paraplegic’s racing wheelchair and take my place as running’s most hated man. Then a Wall Street Journal reporter came across the blog, and the story of my immortal, immoral run ran on its front page—and the condemnations poured in anew.
I had to admit, even as I grumbled about the unfairness of it all, that I had done wrong. But how wrong? Who had I harmed, how much had I harmed them, and what, if anything, should I do about it? So, as an exercise in abnegation, I decided to find out.
The first person I consulted was a rabbi, learned in Talmudic ethics. I laid out the story to Rabbi Douglas Sagal of Westfield, New Jersey, who stroked his beard, cocked an eyebrow, and considered. As he is my brother (and you know how brothers are), he stunned me by saying, “I don’t think you did anything wrong.”