This sounded like Raven (though their running theories diverge quite a bit in the chapter on Preventative Maintenance, where Fixx writes that “the chief enemy of sound training is dogmatism”). While acknowledging Fixx wrote a popular book, Raven said, “To tell you the truth, White Lightning, the first thing that comes to mind about James Fixx is that he died at fifty-two of a heart attack while running.”
Every Raven Runner has a different story of how they came to run. One runner in his early 50s from Venezuela, Hype, told me, “I think the reason why a person starts to run is usually different from why he runs today.” He started running when he was diagnosed with emphysema. Running replaced smoking. He has raced in several marathons and was training for his first fifty-miler. “I started running to get healthy,” he said, “but once I started, I just felt bad not doing it.”
Many runners speak of the sport like they owe it something—like they know what running has done for them, and they want to honor that. On the same run with Hype, I surveyed a few other runners in attendance. I asked Hitter, a fire chief, why he liked to run. “Who says I like to run?” he replied. “You run because you can’t not run.” (Another day, when he was running with a pulled hamstring, he said, “Yeah, you gotta be tough if you’re gonna be dumb.”)
Taxman told me that he ran so that he could eat ice cream. Poutine said, “I’m running to get back in shape and stay ahead of Chapter 11.” Dizzy was running with Urban Myth, On Time, and the Harlem Shuffle. As a group, they agreed on three reasons to run: to be able to consume sugar, food, and beer, though they couldn’t agree on the order. Yellow Rose said, “I run on my own to clear my head. I run with Raven for the community.”
When Chapter 11 turned 80 years old, he invited all the Raven Runners to his birthday party. “The last three generations in my family never lived to be sixty,” he told me in an email. “All died of heart failure.” Today Chapter 11 is the oldest active Raven Runner. (Hurricane had to stop running a few days after his 80th birthday due to knee problems.) “I enjoy the run because of the many nice and beautiful people you meet,” wrote Chapter 11. “It gives you a goal to set for getting awards and being on the list and going to the parties.” In the Hall of Fame, Chapter 11 has over a thousand runs and seven hundred swims, including the record coldest swim. “People run for a lot of reasons: Health. To compete,” he said. “And some people get so addicted they even love to run. But if it was not for the Raven Run, I don’t think I would be alive.”
Another day, I chatted with a soft-spoken, middle-aged French scientist who goes by the name Bloody Wolf. He said he uses the Raven Run to train for marathons. “The slow pace is good because it’s fat-burning rather than glycemic-burning,” he said. “Plus running is therapy.” Bloody Wolf said that running with others creates an intimacy unlike any other interaction. “Maybe it’s because every step you take, your heels pump blood to your brain, and you get more oxygen,” he said. “But there’s just this honesty between people. It’s hard to lie and run at the same time.” He had met more people on the Raven Run than in any other Miami network. “Miami is a city where you could live here for years and never know anyone,” said Bloody Wolf. “But this is something you can do every day—the exact same thing—and meet different people.”
In 2009, the American journalist Christopher McDougall published Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen. The book struck a chord with runners and non-runners alike, selling over three million copies and kicking off the barefoot running craze. “Distance running was revered because it was indispensible,” writes McDougall. “It was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else.”
Today, McDougall says, running is about “getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn’t art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo. No wonder so many people hated running; if you thought it was only a means to an end—an investment in becoming faster, skinnier, richer—then why stick with it if you weren’t getting enough quo for your quid?”
Of the characters in Born to Run, Raven relates most to Caballo Blanco, a former lightweight boxer who started running to mend a broken heart. He trekked to the Copper Canyons in northwest Mexico, where he sought counsel with the Tarahumara, indigenous people whose innate long-distance running ability is the main subject of the book. After years of living with and learning from them, Caballo Blanco organized a race in their homelands, in the hope that their spirit of running would breathe new life into the American culture, which he thought was corrupt and commercial. “I thought this race would be a disaster,” Caballo admitted to the runners who had signed up for the event, “because I thought you’d be too sensible to come . . . But one thing about crazy people—they see things other people don’t.”
On the final page of Born to Run, Caballo gets an offer from the North Face outdoor sports company to sponsor the race. “Caballo thought it over,” writes McDougall. “For about a minute. ‘No thanks,’ he decided. ‘Running isn’t about making people buy stuff. Running should be free, man.’ ” Raven is of the same tribe.
In his life, Raven has run one race, and he wants to make it very clear that he did not pay an entry fee. It was the first road race in South Beach—on the morning of November 26, 1978—starting at the Convention Center for an eight-mile course. The man who paid his entry fee was a local reporter called Umbrella Jack. “He figured that since I ran all the time, I’d win the race, so he wanted to do a story,” explained Raven.
Raven hated every minute. He wasn’t used to running in the morning and drank a cup of black coffee, which made him jumpy and nervous. Cheered on by Coyote and the Astrologer, Raven finished eight miles in fifty-five minutes at a pace of 6:52, placing 150th out of a thousand runners. In the end, Umbrella Jack wasn’t impressed with Raven’s finish and never wrote the article. “I was hurting—my feet, my legs, my calves,” said Raven, rubbing his leg. “It wasn’t worth it. It was too competitive.” He vowed never to run another race again and, to get that one out of his system, he went to the beach a few hours later for eight miles, because, “You know, my thing is the sand.”
* * *
EVERY YEAR IN JANUARY, around the ING Miami Marathon, Raven gets cranky. On the morning of the race, though he is no early bird, he gets up at the crack of dawn and drags a lawn chair outside his apartment to protest the event. He carries signs that he made with messages like “I don’t pay to run, I pray to run,” or “Run free! Run with Raven” or “Where does all this money go?” Begrudgingly, he will cheer for and slap high fives with the Raven Runners in the race. But at some point he will scold them.
It hurts his feelings that out-of-town runners will pay for plane tickets, hotels, and entry fees to race, but they will not fly into Miami for his events—which are free—like the picnic, the banquet, big milestones, or the daily event, which is eight miles. Last year, a couple days before the marathon, Raven posted on Facebook that any Raven Runner who pays to run the marathon is a traitor. (Since getting his first computer in 2013, Raven has joined Facebook.) Knowing how many Raven Runners compete in races, I worried he might alienate some people without context. I called and urged him to reconsider the status update. “Okay, White Lightning,” he said. “Sorry, you know how I get around the marathon.”
Raven said he didn’t know how to edit the post, but he gave me his password, and I edited it while we were on the phone, removing the traitor part but leaving the “Don’t Pay to Run.” (He also openly advocates running the race without paying.) In the same phone call, in a moment of clarity, he told me about a new runner, Tchako, in town for the marathon. “Tchako said for him, paying to run a marathon is like paying for a therapist,” Raven told me. “I get that. I guess some people need races to motivate themselves.”
There is one other explanation for why Raven hates the Miami Marathon, and that is because he has a beef with one of the founders, who has run six times with Raven and is nicknamed the Promoter. He is a young guy in his 30s who grew up in Miami Beach. He is tall and attractive, fast, and wears bright colors—often, a neon green shirt that says WE RUN MIAMI. In addition to organizing the marathon, the Promoter coordinates weekly running groups that meet in various Miami neighborhoods. His runs can attract hundreds of people, which are separated into different pace groups.
When I first moved to Miami, I ran with the Promoter’s group that met on Thursday nights in South Beach. There, I pushed myself to run in the seven-minute-mile pace group. A lot of the conversations revolved around training. Most everyone was polite, young, attractive, well dressed, and seemed to work as a consultant. I got faster, and I met nice people. Before every run, we would have to take a group picture to post on Facebook, tagged as the South Beach Nike Run Club. I sometimes felt like an extra in an advertisement.
In 2013, I learned from my friend Matt, who is active in the club, that the Promoter had shut down the South Beach run because he lost Nike as the sponsor. Matt became the new leader—I supported his run a couple times—until the Promoter found another sponsor and took back control. It’s clear that money at least partially motivates the Promoter to do what he does in the name of running, but a lot of people benefit from his work.
Raven has never had a sponsor and can barely afford his New Balance running shoes. He has drunk Gatorade religiously for the last three decades and even painted his bathroom and kitchen walls lemon-lime, his favorite flavor. He buys and mixes the Gatorade powder himself, but Raven would rather continue buying it than ask for something or have to alter his routine. And for his eight miles, there’s nothing competitive. If you show up, you’re a winner in Raven’s book.
His beef with the Promoter started over what most would consider a mere annoyance: according to Raven, the Promoter promised him that he could fire the gun to start the first marathon but never followed through. Strike one. Then (again, according to Raven) the Promoter promised that he would help organize a race in Raven’s honor but never did.
With Raven, unless you are homeless or a recovering addict, you only get two strikes.
Raven’s greatest pet peeve—in addition to people paying to run—is when people don’t do what they say (God help him in Miami). So Raven has held a grudge against the Promoter and will share it with anyone willing to listen. The Promoter has a grudge against Raven, too, and when I asked him about the rivalry, he accused Raven of sending his henchmen to heckle his group while they stretched. (I’m pretty sure he was talking about a woman named Nutcracker who was acting on her own accord when she yelled at the group that they shouldn’t pay to run and they should run with Raven for free. Of course Raven was delighted when he heard the news.) The Promoter wanted me to know that he doesn’t charge people to run in his clubs, and if you come enough, you can get a free shirt. (I have one.)
In my observation, both men are acting like juveniles, but I will confess one occasion that made me chuckle hard, and it involves a heterosexual cross-dressing man from the Bronx called Karaoke Fred. A typical outfit for Karaoke Fred is a short sequined skirt over pink and purple spandex, a black mesh shirt, and brightly colored feather boas. He loves to sing. On Sunday mornings, he used to set up a karaoke machine next door to Raven’s apartment. “God he was horrible,” says Raven. “He sounded like Bob Dylan on helium. The city had to get an ordinance banning karaoke on Sunday mornings.”
But Karaoke Fred was welcome to run with Raven. Even if his participation made some runners uncomfortable and even though he tried to run next to Raven every time there was media coverage, Raven wasn’t going to be a gatekeeper. His run is open to everyone. Karaoke Fred racked up 149 runs. “Then one afternoon [in 2012] he got really drunk, flipped out, and threatened to kill me,” says Raven. “The lifeguards wanted to arrest him, but I said he was just drunk and leave him alone.”
Getting violent while on the run (or specifically threatening to kill Raven) is like the one thing that will get someone banned from the Raven Run, so Karaoke Fred became the fourth banned runner in history. (Nutcracker, mentioned above, was number five.) Since the incident, Karaoke Fred has apologized, but Raven refuses to lift the ban.
Sometime in 2014, Raven called me. “White Lightning, I just heard the best news ever,” he announced. “Karaoke Fred is running with the Promoter’s Thursday night running group!” This was Raven’s dream scenario. “Talk about killing two birds with one stone,” he continued. “Does it get any better?” Soon my friend Matt was calling me about Fred, too. “He seems, um, nice,” said Matt. “Do you know anything about him?”
Today I still hang out with people from the Promoter’s club, which Raven tolerates. “You know, Raven, I am friends with some normal people,” I once told him apologetically. “I can pass for mainstream.”
“You could fake it if you had to,” Raven acknowledged. “If you had to, you could pass for normal.”
SEVEN
CASTRO IS STILL LAUGHING
The distance from the southernmost tip of Miami Beach to the inlet at Haulover—jetty to jetty—is ten miles. One day in 1979 Raven thought it’d be cool bragging rights to run the whole thing, even though the course took him through pool decks, fences, walls, and parking lots—not to mention deep, soft sand. But he put on his frog-green Adidas running shoes and headed north. One hour and forty-seven minutes later, he was sweaty in Haulover, standing next to bulldozers.
The Army Corps of Engineers had just begun the Dade County Beach Erosion and Hurricane Protection Project, also known as the Beach Nourishment Plan, beach reclamation, or just “dredging.” Since 1926, when a hurricane destroyed the protective dunes, the Atlantic tides had been gobbling up most of the coastline. On top of that, hotels had built pool decks and parking lots right up to (or even over) the shoreline. In the 1960s, Dade County first proposed a plan for the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge sand in from the continental shelf to recreate the protective dunes, but the hotel owners—despite knowing this would protect them from future hurricanes and would give them desired beaches—said no, because the new beachfront would have to be open to the public.
By 1979, the rising tide had changed their minds, and so the plan was finally put into action. Barges anchored off the coast sucked up sand from the ocean floor that traveled through underwater tubes and got spit out in big mounds on the beach. Bulldozers then smoothed it over. At a cost of $68 million, fourteen million cubic yards of sand—four times the amount of construction material used in Egypt’s Great Pyramids—were dredged up from offshore over a four-year period, widening the beach by the length of a football field.
Staring at the bulldozers, Raven tried to imagine the new beach. He didn’t like the idea of changing nature, but dredging would eliminate the groins, and he’d have a lot more beach to run on. A few weeks later, leaping from an eight-foot-tall barrier by the DecoPlage, Raven landed wrong. Tendons in his calf exploded with an audible popping sound, and he barely hobbled home. The next day, he was dragging his leg behind him, thinking, What the hell am I doing this for? when a lifeguard called Ruby—name has been changed—leaned his head out of the stand. “Old people are passing you!” he shouted. “You’re not even running!”
Raven, along with every other person he knew, hated Ruby. He stole coworkers’ lunches and yelled at tourists if they got too close to the stand—unless they were women, in which case he produced a bottle of sunscreen to rub on them. One time, two lifeguards wearing their Beach Patrol T-shirts ran into Ruby’s uncle at a tennis court. “Oh, my nephew is on the Beach Patrol,” said the man. “Do you know Ruby?” His colleagues bowed their heads to avoid saying anything disrespectful. “Yeah I know,” continued his uncle, “he’s an asshole.” (Several lifeguards that run have confirmed these stories. Hitter, now a fireman, told me that Ruby was the second-most-popular lifeguard. “Who w
as the most popular?” I asked. “All the rest,” he said. Giggler added, “I don’t like talking bad about anyone, but this is the kind of guy that even his mom couldn’t like.”)
As Ruby hurled insults, Raven strengthened his resolve. “Looks like your streak is done,” shouted Ruby. “You done, buddy?” His stride may not have been pretty, but Raven wasn’t done. He put his head down and blocked Ruby out.
Mary worried, too. “Why don’t you quit, son?” she told him. “Why don’t you rest a while and let it heal? Everybody rests.”
But the streak was what made Raven different from everybody else. He could rest, he knew, only after he finished eight miles. The Astrologer was the only one who encouraged him to keep going. She bought a DMSO liniment cream to reduce pain and swelling, in a concentration used for horses. Applying it, the Astrologer used her training as a psychic healer and floated her hands a half-inch above his leg, channeling all her energy to make him better. “She got in a trance state—not touching me—just hovering above it,” Raven says. “It helped. In a certain way, she was a saint.” He never took a painkiller, not even an aspirin. The Astrologer kept saying, “It’s going to get better,” and three months later, one day in August, her prediction came true, though the injury left him with permanent varicose veins winding up his right leg, like vines from a banyan tree.
Raven wanted more than “something casual” with this woman who could be saintly, and one night over a romantic dinner at Picciolo’s, he said, “It’s been four and a half years since we got together. Do you think we should get serious?”
The 49-year-old woman looked at her 28-year-old boyfriend and said, “Eh,” which hurt Raven. “Well I’m not gonna be young forever,” he said. “If a girl comes onto me, I’m not going to say no.”
Running with Raven Page 7