That year, Gringo and Firecracker tied for Favorite Runner. Most Improved went to Chocolate Chip. Chapter 11 got Comeback of the Year. Treasure Hunter went to Reverend. For juggling three balls for eight miles, Spinner got Event of the Year. “He dropped them a couple times,” says Raven. “But he is an excellent juggler.” Bookworm was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Taking it all in, Poutine promised, “I’ll be back.”
She happened to move to South Beach on the day Raven was going to put his mother in a nursing home. When she mentioned she was looking for part-time work, Raven asked if she would like to meet Mary. The two hit it off, and Raven hired her immediately. In May, Poutine and another runner, Cooker, asked Mary if she wanted to run with Raven.
They borrowed a beach wheelchair from the lifeguards and pushed Mary in the sand from 5th Street to Government Cut, then up the boardwalk to 47th Street. Mary was rolling parallel to her running son, waving and laughing the whole time. After eight, Raven asked, “Did you like that, Mom?”
“Yes,” said Mary. “Let’s do it again.”
She requested the name “Boardwalk Mary,” from her years as a teenager selling ice cream on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, or she also liked “Pretzel Mary,” because her cabinets were stocked with pretzels. But even for his mother, Raven wouldn’t bend the rules, and Mary never made the official list.
Her dementia set in not long after the boardwalk run. At first, Raven got angry when Mary couldn’t remember things. Once, she thought his name was Jack. Another day, she called him Robert, but when he asked, “And who am I?” his mother answered, “I think you’re a friend.”
“And what about your son?” asked Raven.
“He’s no good,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in years. But you’re a nice man. You feed me every day.”
Raven took it personally. “How can she not know who I am?” he asked Miracle, who had lost her mother to Alzheimer’s.
“You’re not going to win this battle,” she said. “You just gotta let it go.”
* * *
AS HIS MOTHER WAS FORGETTING HIM, the city of Miami Beach was planning an event to recognize Raven. On October 17, 2007—Raven’s 57th birthday—at City Hall in Miami Beach, Mayor David Dermer proclaimed it Robert Raven Kraft Day as he read:
Robert Raven Kraft, longtime Miami Beach resident, local legend, and avid runner has been running on the soft sands of Miami beach for the past twenty-nine years without missing a single day’s run or a single Miami Beach sunset in that quarter century-plus stretch . . . Over 344 people have completed the “Raven Run” and all of them—whether one-time runners or regulars—are better for the time that they spend with Robert Raven Kraft. The “Raven Run” continues to grow and is a bona fide Miami Beach Institution, with a devoted following that includes members of the Miami Beach Ocean Patrol . . . We are grateful to him for sharing his simple, peaceful, and healthy lifestyle with so many over the years and look forward to the miles of sand that lie ahead.
“For years, I always thought I was a nobody, a nothing,” says Raven. “Talk about not an overnight success. But when the mayor said those nice words, I was humbled. I thought, I’m finally getting some positive feedback for what I’ve done, through sweat, blood, and tears.”
Soon ESPN followed with more recognition. In December, they published an online story on the culture of streak running, and Raven was the poster child. “Kraft is a member of a rare and obsessed breed, a streak runner,” wrote reporter Joshua Hammann, who called Raven “the Forrest Gump of South Beach.”
He also called people who ran with him “a mixed bag of Raven-wannabes who will follow him anywhere, like baby ducklings trailing behind their mama.” (While I might agree there are quacks, followers are uncommon—except Eva “Follower,” a 53-year-old woman from Warsaw, who usually runs ahead of the group kicking a tennis ball or dribbling a soccer ball. She has more than a hundred runs.)
For Raven’s thirty-three years and 95,000 miles on the streak, “the only tangible reward . . . is the number eleven spot on the United States Running Streak Association’s active list,” noted Hammann. Raven told him he was chasing a goal of 100,000 miles—on track for March 2009—and after that he might end the streak. This news caught Miracle off guard. In the article, she is quoted: “I’m surprised he’s actually able to discuss ending it rationally. I just don’t think he’ll ever be able to stop.”
As the Raven Run recruits poured in from the story, Raven heard that journalist Chris Connelly wanted to feature him on the program, Outside the Lines. For his hundred thousandth mile, ESPN would be sending a camera crew.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON, Abdul the pilot was sitting on a wall by the beach entrance at 5th Street with a shaved head and a full beard. “Are you allowed to fly with that beard?” asked Raven.
Lowering his chin to his chest, Abdul pointed to a new scar that wrapped around the base of his scalp. “I got a brain tumor,” he said—a malignant glioma, the same as Ted Kennedy, who’ d just been diagnosed in May 2008. “I’m on medical leave,” Abdul told Raven as they walked to the beach.
It was a short vacation for Abdul, but he squeezed in several runs with Raven. When he got back to Seattle, he started radiation. To get to the treatment center, Abdul ran six miles each way. Raven was his pen pal throughout. Abdul sent pictures of his running trail at home, around the lakes, through the forest. Raven kept him updated on Run gossip, as well as Mary and Gringo, who was going through chemotherapy.
“Chemo, that’s something else,” Gringo recalled to me. “Ugh, it’s just pure poison to our bodies. It tries to do everything to you, and you just fight everything it’s trying to do. When I got my first dose, I started to lie down, and I thought, God, I’m not sleepy, what am I lying down for? That’s the trick. Get up. I went out and ran with Raven, and I thought, I’m gonna take my shoes off, just for the discipline of feeling my feet going over the rocks.”
In 2008, both Gringo and Abdul completed eight-mile runs with Raven while fighting cancer. “I’m saying this not for me but for everyone that goes through this chemotherapy,” says Gringo. “Don’t cede to it. Never. Don’t cede to it. As sick as you can be, you can get up.”
When Abdul came to the banquet in 2009, his words were scrambled as he accepted the Fitness award. Though few could understand him, all Raven Runners respected him. Abdul’s last run with Raven was on March 28, 2009—the day before the hundred thousandth mile. When they finished, Abdul grabbed Raven’s hand and said, “You made it.”
* * *
A CROWD WAS WAITING FOR HIM at the 5th Street lifeguard stand on March 29, 2009. There was a police escort, an ESPN film crew, Miami Herald reporters, local news, and hundreds of Raven Runners. “It was a thrill,” says Raven. “If I had to pick two moments in my life, I’d say that day and meeting Johnny Cash.”
The adrenaline made Raven run faster than usual, and he finished eight miles in eighty-five minutes. “But I had this thing where I couldn’t run less than ninety minutes,” says Raven, “so I ran in place for five minutes. The news crews were there, and they were looking at me like, This guy really is crazy.”
Before going home, Raven announced, “Depending on how I feel, I may not come back tomorrow.”
That night Raven did some thinking. He thought, I’m fighting a lot of injuries. I’m not making money. I’m not getting a family. Maybe I should do something else. Or retire and travel. “But it just so happened the next day, I was on a high, I felt good and what else do I know how to do but run? I didn’t want to disappoint anybody. I was there.”
The episode aired two months later in May to an audience of 97 million. “People were calling me day and night,” says Raven happily. “Kids would call and say I was their inspiration, that they wanted to run with me. Or people would say that running had saved them. One guy in California was calling me all the time, saying that I keep him going. Women were calling, saying, ‘I just had a baby, and I’m going to start running because of you.’ I w
ould write letters to people. There were tons of comments online. Tortuga printed them out for me. I really got a kick out of reading what people thought of me.”
I asked if he still had the comments. “I’m a hoarder,” he answered. “You know I have them. But really most of the comments were positive. No one said that I was a total nut. People said it’s crazy but it’s great. People asked what was with all the chest hair. Some said that I looked like an old hippie, or a hybrid of Chuck Norris and Jesus Christ.”
Fortune didn’t come with fame, and Raven is okay with that. “The idea is to get people healthy,” he says. “If people see it and say, ‘If that guy can do it, I can do it,’ and they start running, it’s a good thing.”
* * *
HELPING OTHER PEOPLE took his mind off his own problems. Many days, Raven came home to a full answering machine with panicked messages from his mother. “Everything was an emergency,” says Raven. Mary literally wore out her telephone keypad from dialing, and Raven had to take away her Rolodex when friends complained she called too much.
One day, after listening to desperate messages from his mother, Raven ran to her apartment and found her crying. She held up her beloved teddy bear, Adam, and shrieked, “He’s not eating! He’s not eating. He’s going to die.” Adam’s face was covered in banana. Prying the stuffed animal from his mother’s hands, Raven patted Adam’s stomach. “It’s okay, Mom,” he said gently. “I fed him earlier.” Then she couldn’t remember Adam’s name and got more and more distressed. “His name is Bagdad,” she said, pausing. “No, it’s Sinclair. Or is it Billy? Oh, I know—it’s Adam!” Raven smiled and said, “That’s right, Mom. It’s Adam.”
The compulsive calling eventually stopped when Mary forgot about the phone. She also lost vocabulary. The air conditioner became a wind-blower, and when she couldn’t remember the word “peel,” she asked Raven to “break” the banana. “When they’re slipping into Alzheimer’s, they fight it, and they can get mean,” says Raven. “Even her voice—she always sounded young, but the disease turns you into a different person. It was hard.”
Sometimes Mary believed she was in a train station in Philadelphia or Arizona. “It was strange,” says Raven, “because she had never been to Arizona. So I would show her pictures and tell her, ‘Look, here are your things. You’re home.’ And that would comfort her a little. She’d say, ‘Oh, I’m home.’ ”
Bedbound, Mary couldn’t do anything for herself. “I compare her to a baby,” says Raven, “but the thing is, with a baby, there’s a lot of satisfaction; you’re seeing growth and progress, they’re walking and talking and learning. But this is the other way around. Everything is going down. I really hate to say it—I feel so guilty—but I just wanted my life back. I thought, God, is this woman ever going to die?”
A neighbor from El Salvador named Berta helped to take care of Mary, but despite the sponge baths and position changes, Mary developed bedsores. That is when, in May 2010, Raven called the paramedics. A woman from Adult Protective Services, a branch of the Department of Elder Affairs, showed up, too. Cornering Raven, she demanded, “What did you do to her? Tell me what you did.” Raven recalls, “Here I am, my mother is dying, and this woman is threatening to take me to jail.”
At the hospital, Mary was a vegetable. Raven didn’t know what to do. “My mother always said, ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope,’ ” recalls Raven. But looking at her, he saw no life. “If I ever get like that, give me something. Get me out. I’d want to die.”
When Mary stopped eating, the nurses asked about a feeding tube, which Raven declined. Mary was transferred to hospice, where they managed her pain with morphine. “She was smiling,” says Raven. “The last thing she said was, ‘I feel fine.’ ”
Just before midnight on May 17, 2010—a year to the day after ESPN aired his hundred thousandth mile—Mary closed her eyes and died in her sleep. “It was like her time ran out,” says Raven.
The next day he was running with Philly Rock, whose father had died of Alzheimer’s. “It’s funny,” Raven observed, “as soon as she died, I imagined her as young again. She was like thirty-five, we’re going down to the beach, or she was taking me to school, holding my hand. It was a nice feeling. I don’t remember her as old.” Philly Rock said the same thing had happened to him when his father died.
A few weeks later, people from the Raven Run community gathered in front of the 5th Street lifeguard stand to celebrate Mary’s life. Tortuga, Electrolyte, Barnacle, Karaoke Fred, and the Giggler were all there. In his eulogy, Raven said Mary had been a great mom. “She believed in me so much that if I ever killed somebody, she would’ve said, ‘Aw, he didn’t mean it.’ Or, ‘Maybe the guy deserved it.’ ” Poutine started crying. Creve Coeur and his wife, Hollywood Flasher, were filming.
As the building manager for a thirty-two-unit apartment, Mary “dealt with people from all walks of life—from Holocaust survivors with tattoo numbers on their arms, old Florida people, rednecks, Latinos, and people from every country you can imagine,” continued Raven. During the Mariel Boatlift, she rented an apartment to three transvestites. “She always talked their language. She knew how to get along with everybody.”
Raven said she was a character herself. She tried to lead by example and live the right way. “Although she wasn’t perfect, which none of us are, hopefully she’s with God in heaven.” When he finished, he invited people to say a few words.
Firecracker read a poem. Miracle remarked, “I’ve never seen anybody take care of a mother like he did, and he became more of a man through that.”
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of my mother,” Raven told me. “I’m very sentimental; just about every little thing brings up memories.” There is both sadness and fear in his voice. “And I can’t help but think, What if I end up like that?” he asks. “Who’s gonna take care of me?”
VIII
LEGEND
I run with Raven to be a part of history.
—Encyclopedia, 205 runs
There’s this need for the kind of myth that people used to have and we don’t have anymore. Nobody believes in the Man of Steel, and people want something they can believe in. No matter where you are in the world, you know there’s this superhuman guy doing something that’s impossible to imagine.
—Miracle, 302 runs, 775 swims
He’s a legend! Once people hear about this mysterious man running on the beach every single day since 1975—and that you’re allowed to and invited to join him—well you just can’t help yourself. You want to know more. You want to be part of history being made. And on top of it, you get a nickname!
—KittyCat, commuter from NYC, 17 runs
So much is mental, really. All I gotta do is think about these legs moving, and somehow they move.
—Raven
EIGHTEEN
EQUAL IN RUNNING CLOTHES
Raven is my number one suggestion for things to do in Miami Beach. When people come to visit, I tell them to bring their running shoes. “There’s no way in hell I’m running eight miles,” said my brother Eric, who is a psychiatrist, when he arrived from Massachusetts with his friend Kerry, an osteopathic physician, in March 2014.
“No problem,” I said, “I just want you to meet Raven.”
“Great,” said Eric. “I’ll run a mile or two with him.”
This is usually how it happens. Someone is curious about Raven’s story and gets convinced to try one or two miles with him. Eric is 40 years old, about six-foot-one with an athletic build, but he’s never been a distance runner. He is a smart guy—a member of Mensa with a medical degree and a Juris Doctorate. He is shy at first. Knowing me like he does, he expected his little sister to find a pocket of athletic oddballs in South Florida with whom to associate. But he didn’t expect to show up to the Raven Run and meet another member of Mensa, named Close Call, who is from Finland. He also didn’t expect to meet Sleazebuster, the Northwestern law professor. Eric also met Dos Equis, a boat bui
lder from the Dominican Republic who looks like and has lived like the Most Interesting Man in the World.
His friend, Kerry, was familiar with the Hash House Harriers, a running group that calls themselves, “a drinking club with a running problem,” and also uses nicknames. She was ready to like Raven and his runners from the get-go.
After a mile or two at our slow pace, Eric was in deep conversation with Close Call. Then another mile passed, and another mile, as Eric made his way around talking to different friendly people. At six miles, Raven turned to me. “I think your brother is going to make all eight,” he said. “We need a nickname.” At that moment, Eric and Kerry were talking about a trip to Hawaii, where they hiked around volcanoes. Close Call said, “Have you ever seen lightning produced in a volcanic plume? It’s called Volcano Lightning.” Raven loves nicknames within families to be related, so two miles later, finishing at the 5th Street lifeguard stand, Eric became Volcano Lightning, brother to White Lightning. Kerry became Morning Dew, because she is a morning person and her middle name is Dew. They couldn’t believe they’d run eight miles.
For the next three days, Eric couldn’t walk properly, but I was proud of him, and he was proud of himself. When I asked his professional opinion on Raven, he said, “Look, he’s found something that works for him, and a lot of people have benefited from it and made connections.” (In another conversation, my father had said the same thing. “I think running has been a good thing for Raven,” said Dr. Huttenbach. “It’s good to have a sense of mastery over something. He has found a group of people who honor what he’s doing. He’s found respect and companionship. Some people find that through marriage, a profession, or church. But Raven’s found meaning through running.”)
Running with Raven Page 17