Meanwhile Kerry was worried about Raven’s physical condition, elaborating on complications that he could face in the future. “He could get stress fractures, his arthritis could impinge the nerves so much that he loses motor function in his legs,” she said. Basically, Raven was running toward a wheelchair. She asked, “He does know that he will still be Raven even if he’s not running, right?”
* * *
WHEN YOU ASK A RAVEN RUNNER how they met Raven, the responses run the gamut. “It was the afternoon of December 31, 2013,” recalled Lutefisk, a 56-year-old journalist from Norway, in an email to me. “I was running on the beach southward heading for the pier—alone. Toward me comes a group of twenty cheerful people. I pass them, but the laughter and fun atmosphere catches me. I turn around and catch up with them. I ask one runner what it’s all about. And soon Raven invites me to run with them. And it is just great!” His nickname comes from his country’s traditional dish, which is dried cod soaked in lye until the fish becomes like a gel. (Originally he liked the name but now he’s campaigning to change it because his roll call is, “The smelliest fish in Norway!”)
During Lutefisk’s first short holiday in Miami Beach, he completed seven eight-mile runs. Since then, “I have come back from Norway three times to run with this legend of a man. I have made good friends thanks to Raven. It feels good to be around nice people. It is social, it is healthy, and it is always exciting to see who shows up. To me, being Norwegian, it is sort of like having a family in an exciting place like Miami Beach. I no longer feel like a tourist, but a part of the community.”
Thunder is a man from New Haven living in California who was in town for a business trip in 2007. “I was lucky enough to call a Miami running store while I was there and ask if there were any running clubs,” Thunder explained. “They said to run with Raven. I came across his old website and saw photos of people with nicknames like ‘Angry Man,’ a list of runners named ‘One Run Wonders,’ and I said to myself, ‘I have to check this out.’ ” After his first eight miles, he got the nickname from his favorite basketball player Darryl Dawkins, aka Chocolate Thunder. “I think what impressed me most was the second time I came to Miami Beach and showed up at tower five, Raven remembered my real name, nickname, where I was from now, where I originally came from, and birthday,” he recalled. “It was kind of freaky. I thought maybe he just got lucky with all my info for some reason, but over the years I have seen him do the same with others that show up.” I’ve run with Thunder several times, and those miles have consistently come with the worst weather, which we joke that it’s because Thunder and White Lightning are together.
When I asked Thunder what it was about Raven that drew people from all over the world to run eight miles with him, he responded: “I really do not know for certain, though I do believe most, if not all, runners are insane. And I think Raven takes insane as far as you can take it (I mean that it in a good way). Maybe some strange ‘insanity attraction’ that makes us show up. I say insane because why the heck do we spend all that time running and, in many cases, beating our bodies up? For some reason, I keep doing it. There’s a little celebrity status meeting and running with Raven and saying you did, maybe a bucket list item for some, maybe something different from all the tourist things to do while in Miami Beach. And granted it would be a lot harder for people to come run with the Raven if he was living in some strange place like Montezuma, Iowa (yes, I’ve been and ain’t nothing going on). Miami Beach is an ideal location for Raven and for visitors to come together. It’s a great beach to run on. Now if you ask me what was my most memorable Raven Run moment . . . I’d have to think about that one for a while. There’s more than a few.”
On Raven’s 64th birthday run—October 17, 2014—I was next to Butcher, a man whose twelve-pack abs defy his 50 years. Two years before, fresh out of prison for drug trafficking, Butcher was seeking a regimen to get his life back on track when, at the pull-up bars, Raven invited him to run. “A guy I was in jail with told me, ‘You gotta find a group to be a part of or something to get involved in,’ ” recalled Butcher. “Because, you know, there’s no transition from prison to the free world.” After working up to the eight miles, Butcher set out to run with Raven every day for a hundred days, but instead kept the streak going for two hundred, setting a new Raven Run record. “It’s not only Raven but all the positive people you meet out here. I was in a really dark place with anger management issues, and the run just sucks the negativity out of you.” These days Butcher is a calm but demanding personal trainer whose clients include fellow Raven Runners. “God only knows where I’d be without Raven and this run. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
* * *
A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE SURPRISED by how much they like Raven and how much they relate to Raven Runners. Shoe Guy first ran with Raven on March 29, 2009—the day that Raven hit 100,000 streak miles. “While I had seen Raven on the run, I had not known his story,” Shoe Guy recalled to me in an email. “What I learned from other runners about Raven that day was so impressive that I had a hard time reconciling that as a runner, I had not known his story.”
So he came back.
A lot.
“Over seven years and [almost] seven hundred runs, I’ve seen that like the Pied Piper, Raven draws a varied lot,” Shoe Guy observed. “Unlike the Pied Piper, very few are rats and many bring their own interesting stories from all around America and all over the world. And, many great friendships have resulted from uncommon people meeting and following this one-of-a-kind world-beater.” Through Raven, he met one of his best friends, a financier from Rhode Island called Salt Shaker. Shoe is also a terrific recruiter, having brought many friends and family members to run, including his hometown friend from Wisconsin who completed eight on two replaced knees, earning him the nickname, Replacement, and the 2011 Event of the Year.
I was running with Raven and Shoe Guy once in October 2012 when Raven said, “I got a quick story for you, White Lightning. It involves you, Shoe.”
“Oh?” said Shoe.
“It’s about one of our records,” said Raven. “The coldest swim.” Shoe Guy smiled, immediately recognizing the story. “Well, the first part of the story was on January 8, 2010,” began Raven. “We finish the run, and the air temperature is forty-five degrees—the coldest day so far for a swim—so Shoe Guy goes in the water and breaks the record.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Shoe Guy with a smirk. “It was a short-lived record.”
Raven continued. “Well, I get home and tell Miracle that Shoe Guy broke the record, and she said, ‘I want that record—will you go back to the beach with me and make it official?’ She’s probably the only one I’d do it for, but I went back and strolled along the shoreline until she finished. When she left the water, the air temperature was 44 degrees, so she broke Shoe Guy’s record like an hour after he got it. ”
“Can I interject something?” asked Shoe Guy. “About Dictator?”
“Yeah, I’m getting to that,” said Raven. “Shoe Guy’s friend, Dictator, said that since Miracle was wearing a wetsuit that day, it shouldn’t count. Anyway, the next day, it turned out to be even colder, and Chapter 11, in his seventies, tried to get the record from Miracle, but Miracle showed up, too. To make sure Dictator didn’t have anything to say about the wetsuit, she stripped down and went in the water naked. Then Chapter 11 mumbles, ‘Err, mm, I’m going to take my clothes off, too.’ All I remember is Miracle’s round, white butt running into the water and then Chapter 11’s old, flat butt a few steps behind, trying to catch up.”
“All for a Raven Run record,” I said. Shoe Guy and Raven looked at me like I just wasn’t getting it.
“Yeah,” they both answered.
That was the story as told on the run. The next day, I sat down with Miracle and Raven for an interview. “I heard that Dictator challenged your coldest swim record because you wore a wetsuit,” I said.
“What? I don’t
remember Dictator saying that,” she said. “I really struggled the first day to finish the swim because the zipper on my wetsuit was broken, and it filled up with water.” She took a deep breath. “Then the next day, I’m at home in South Dade, happily reading on my couch when I looked outside, and it was raining. I opened the door—it was about five thirty—and I could feel the temperature dropping. I went, ‘Oh, shit, it’s going to be just as cold tonight.’ ” Miracle looked at me for a response, so I nodded.
“Well, I knew that son of a bitch, Chapter 11, was already at the beach, and all he had to do was walk out of his apartment, so I just jumped in the car and raced over here. I didn’t even stop to check the Weather Channel—nothing. I drove as fast as I could in the fucking rain. I ran at least one red light and parked illegally on Fifth somewhere and ran to the stand. I got here just in time ’cause there’s Chapter getting ready to go.
“By this time, I’ve already gotten the information from Raven that it’s thirty-whatever degrees [36 degrees], and I’m going to have to do it again,” said Miracle. “That’s when I realized, ‘I’m still toasty warm ’cause I drove twenty-seven miles with the heater on full blast and if I take the time to put on a suit, I’ll be really cold.’ So I just said, ‘Fuck it. Gentlemen, avert your eyes. I’m going in.’ I was naked in six seconds. I hit the water flying, and knocked it out. Oh, man, it was so fucking cold and raw. So that’s it. It’s not much of a story.”
“Not much of a story?” said Raven. “It’s a classic!”
“No,” Miracle corrected him. “I just—I couldn’t have endured that awful, fucking, first-record-breaking swim to lose it the very next day on a freaky cold front situation. I couldn’t let that happen. I mean, come on.”
“So you did it all for a Raven Run record?” I asked Miracle.
She shot me a similar look to the one that I had received from Shoe Guy and Raven. “Yeah,” she said. “All for a fucking record.”
* * *
CREVE COEUR IS A FEDERAL MARSHAL and bodybuilder in his 40s from Creve Coeur, Missouri, who I met on a run in June 2011. He has a shaved head and silver eyes and looks like he could lift me over his head with one hand. Creve first heard of Raven when “a homeless guy and Raven Run coach, Eugene, said that I should run with him,” Creve recalled to me later in an email. “I had crossed paths with Raven while running on South Beach about a dozen times over 2005, but thought he was a bit too different than my clean-cut self and a tad unapproachable. So I had only just nodded or waved to him.” When his then friend—now wife—Isabel seconded Eugene’s recommendation to run with Raven, he finally agreed. “Isabel said Raven was really interesting and shared my devotion to fitness and running,” wrote Creve. “Little did I know Raven was exponentially more devoted than myself to running.”
Creve and Isabel completed their first eight-mile run in September 2005. Isabel, a photographer from California, became Hollywood Flasher. In Creve’s words: “I admired Raven’s eternal determination and discipline. I enjoyed Raven’s evening leisurely distance pace and learning all his South Beach stories . . . thousands of miles’ worth over the years. I have never belonged to a group before so it was fun to start friendships through running and constantly meet new runners. I was also slowly becoming more attached to my future wife through all the runs. I tried to remain distant from her (wanting to remain a bachelor till I was 50), but she really started growing on me with her devotion to keeping up with me on the run. The more miles we ran the closer we became. Finally, at the start of a Raven Run one day, I proposed to her.”
When Flasher said yes, Creve turned to Raven and said, “I’d like you to marry us.”
Raven said, “I wish I could, Creve, but I’m not ordained.”
Creve said, “Oh, we can take care of all that online.” So Raven was ordained under the official title, Right Reverend Robert Running Raven.
On December 5, 2009—Creve’s 40th birthday—at four o’clock, guests gathered at the 5th Street lifeguard stand to witness the first-ever wedding ceremony on the Raven Run. Hollywood Flasher wore a short, strapless white gown with running shoes and a garter belt. The groom ran shirtless with a bow tie and passed out extra bow ties to his male attendants. Runners Seaside Sparrow, Poutine, Firecracker, and Tortuga held cue cards with Raven’s lines written in magic marker. Film crews from Channel Six attended the ceremony as well, and the story made national news and NPR. (The run was the second ceremony of the day. “I did one ceremony for them in the morning at the pier—you know, in case some of their guests couldn’t run the whole eight miles,” explained Raven.) The occasion won the Raven Run Event of the Year, though Flasher and Creve hold a couple records. They both ran on the hottest day (102 degrees), and Flasher holds the record for most miles ever run by a female in a day—forty-one miles, including eight with Raven—while wearing a thong. She is in the Hall of Fame.
Now Flasher and Creve live on a farm in Redlands, Florida, and have two kids. Though they don’t get to run with Raven often, Creve credits the run for the couple’s happy ending. “The run is what’s kept us together,” he said. What at first put him off from meeting Raven now Creve finds most admirable. “Raven is unique in a world of domesticated clones and people who struggle to fit in everywhere,” Creve wrote to me. He has seen Raven encourage many runners and non-runners alike to complete eight miles and keep coming back. “Personally I’ve always been a self-motivator, but from my experience most people need a motivating friend or trainer to get them to work out or go jogging,” he said. “Knowing that every day at the same time Raven is running is comforting for people to get off their rear and go out and run with him. I have to admit there were times I was going to skip my run because of a thunderstorm or cold weather and the only reason I ended up going was because I knew Raven would be there.”
* * *
FIVE YEARS AFTER CREVE AND FLASHER’S MARRIAGE, Raven officiated his second wedding between Raven Runners, Extra and Molder. Extra met Raven when she’d just moved to Miami and was going through a rough time, out of work and uncertain about love. “I used to go running on the beach at odd times of day,” she said. “As I made it over the dune one day, Lobotomy handed me a flyer for the Raven Run. I was very happy because I’d been feeling so lonely and isolated, and Oscar [Molder] wasn’t a runner, so these solo runs were becoming monotonous.” The following afternoon at five thirty, she came to the 5th Street lifeguard stand. “I’ll never forget running with Gringo, listening to his life story, then looking out across the water at a cruise ship on the edge of a lavender horizon; flaming orange, reflecting the last rays of the October sunset.” Soon Extra, who is a painter, accepted an artist residency in Vermont. “I told Oscar I wasn’t coming back,” she explained to me in an email. “Well, he knew I had been running with Raven, and decided to go check it out for himself (which was shocking because he never liked running). I couldn’t believe he actually ran the full eight and got a name . . . it made me reevaluate him and his dedication to our relationship. I knew he did it to feel closer to me while I was away.” When she came back to South Beach, Molder, a professor of sculpture at FIU, proposed.
In a stationary ceremony in January 2013, Extra wore a short taffeta mocha dress and sparkly high heels. Molder wore a gray suit with a blue Oxford and a yellow striped tie. The Reverend wore a fringed black leather jacket, black denim jeans, and a homemade black shoelace belt. His clergy card was in his left pocket.
I know this because Raven invited me to attend the wedding at the rock wall jetty by Government Cut. “I even wore my boots,” said Raven, clicking his heels against the pavement.
“I love the fray,” said Extra, pointing to his shoulder. Raven smiled and raised his arms so the leather tassels jiggled in the wind. “We wanted an intimate ceremony and someone who knew us,” explained Extra. “Not just a stranger with authority. We thought Raven would be perfect. He’s someone we know and love and trust.” Her fiancé added, “He’s a friend. We wanted a friend to marry us.”
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As we approached the shoreline, passersby shouted congratulations. The very sweet ceremony lasted five minutes. At the end, Raven turned away from the couple and looked at us. Then he remembered the closing line. “Now, you may kiss the bride,” even though the blissful newlyweds were already locked at the lips. After they signed the marriage certificate, I asked Raven if he had advice for the newlyweds. “Compromise,” he answered without hesitation. “And the woman is always right.”
* * *
CHOCOLATE CHIP IS A DENTIST who eats chocolate four or five times a day. Though he’d been running in Miami since 1967, he first heard of Raven in the early 1990s. “I heard something about a weird-looking man who lived on Miami Beach and was rumored to run eight miles every single day . . . on the sand . . . in the heat of the late afternoon . . . dressed in black,” Chocolate Chip wrote to me. “As someone who had been running in our hot and humid climate for several decades, and was quite familiar with how challenging that could be, I dismissed the information about that guy as pure hyperbole. However, every so often over the next ten years, I would hear the same hard-to-believe story about the Miami Beach Running Man. Then, in 2001, when I heard that his name was the Raven, I resolved to see this for myself.”
On a steamy August afternoon, Chocolate Chip showed up at the 5th Street lifeguard stand. “Even though I had never run on the soft sand before, I figured I’d be able to stay with him until he pooped out,” he recalled, pointing out that he had sixteen marathons under his belt. “When I was about fifty yards from the lifeguard stand, I spotted a well-muscled, hairy-chested man in black running shorts. My first thought was that he looked like a cross between a pirate and an Oakland Raider season-ticket holder. I was intimidated by his appearance and didn’t want to approach him. My second thought was to hang back, give him a two-hundred-yard head start and tail him, noting just how long he could go before he stopped. So I did! I lasted two and a half miles. He left me eating his dust (er, sand). I walked off the beach with my tail between my legs. My skepticism and disbelief turned to respect.”
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