Running with Raven

by Laura Lee Huttenbach

  He came back months later, when it was cooler. “This time I completed the run,” he said. “In the process I met a very nice man and learned a great deal.” Since then, he has run 723 times with Raven—all complete, eight-mile runs without one partial on the books. He began the tradition of a “half-way joke,” where, beginning at the four-mile mark, he delivered a funny story that usually took up at least a mile. He explains, “I thought it would be a good idea to tell a lengthy joke at the midpoint of the run so as to make the second half seem shorter than the first half.” It worked.

  (Raven told me his all-time favorite from Chocolate Chip, which went like this: A surfer finds a genie in the bottle, and the genie pops up and says, “I’ll grant you any wish in the whole world.” The surfer says, “I’d love to have a bridge from California to Hawaii so I won’t ever have to fly to go surfing.” The genie says, “Man, you’re really asking for a lot. Really. What else can I do for you? Give me something else.” So the man says, “I’d really love to know what makes women tick, to understand them and know what satisfies them and makes them happy.” The genie thinks for a minute and says, “How many lanes you want in that bridge?”)

  In 2009, Chocolate Chip was inducted in the Hall of Fame. On Raven, he says, “He’s a genuinely nice guy that has a unique lifestyle. He lives simply, but is extremely interesting on many different levels. He is unequivocally, universally welcoming, providing companionship and camaraderie while on a run in an absolutely beautiful location. What could be better?”

  * * *

  TRANSPORTER IS FROM GERMANY and was invited by the man himself to run. “I remember I was playing in the sand with my one-year-old daughter wearing a Marines shirt, which apparently triggered Raven to greet me ‘military style’ while running past me. I later found out who he is and pledged to come back to run with him.” He kept his promise and completed his first eight in 2009. “Nobody will ever understand how much this run means to me,” he wrote in an email. In bullet points, he listed four reasons why he runs with Raven: “Because I enjoy Raven’s stories and being a part of history, I meet wonderful people along the way, I get inspired to try new things in life, and I have become a better person since running with him.”

  In another email, he expounded on his motivations that he believes he shares with many runners: “The ‘semi-regulars’ (my segment) repeatedly join, because they feel connected to the free spirit of the run, to Raven, to the other runners, to the ‘Raven community.’ Runners not only learn from Raven, but also from the other runners’ stories, about all sorts of things in life. You tap into a pool of great people, all professions, all ages, all cultures, all fitness levels, all sizes and shapes . . . It gets you energized, opens up your mind, thinking about my own life, you enjoy the ‘here and now’—I personally experienced that it helps me to become more innovative and creative. Through Raven so many people started a new episode in their life, at least started to work on ‘projects’ they would not have thought of without the run. In one sentence: The Raven Run is magic.”

  By doing the same exact thing every day, Raven inspires Transporter and many others to do something new.

  * * *

  JURISPRUDENCE, a beautiful and bubbly blond lawyer in her 30s, met Raven in November 2010. She had just moved from her hometown of Brussels and was living in an apartment with a balcony that overlooked South Beach at 5th Street. “I saw Raven showing up every day at the lifeguard stand in front of my apartment,” she told me. “I was drawn by the consistency, the structure that it added to my day as well. I could be absolutely sure of him showing up every day at the same time, ready to take whomever wanted to join him on a run, or more like on a running journey.” An athlete herself (the former national karate champion of Belgium), Jurisprudence became a regular. “I got the family feeling. I loved the diverse interesting group of people you get to run and talk with. Everyone is equal in running clothes. We all shared a passion for sports and a true caring for each other and for Raven.”

  * * *

  HOT FURNACE CAME WITH HIS FATHER-IN-LAW from Alexandria, Louisiana, to run with Raven in August 2013. In his words, “I first learned of Raven when I saw him on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel [that aired in October 2011]. I was fascinated with this man who’ d not let anything stop him from running. Running had been a big part of my life. In a way, it was my best friend. I first began running as a very obese youth determined to lose weight and fit in. I lost a hundred and fifteen pounds at the age of fourteen, and used running for the next twenty years to keep it off. Running changed my life. I’d hate to even think about what my life would have been like had I not taken that weight off and continued as that fat awkward kid that I was. At the time I saw Raven on TV, I had stopped because of back problems. A few years earlier, after being diagnosed with one bulging and one ruptured disc, a doctor told me I couldn’t run anymore. I had put on weight, feeling dreadful and depressed over my physical condition. Now here was this guy who loves Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, is a huge baseball fan, and has back problems just like me. I was so inspired, I put on my shoes and hit the sidewalk! It hurt, but I shuffled out three miles. I set a goal to run three miles every day for a month. Three months later I was still going, except many days doing five miles. The pain was almost gone, and my speed wasn’t what it had been in my younger years, but not bad.

  “One day, while on vacation, I was running atop a cruise ship in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. The view was so spectacular that I just kept running. When I stopped, I had run seven miles. It was at that moment I realized, I can work up to eight and go run with Raven! I booked a flight and hotel the moment I got home. Even talked my father-in-law into training and going with me. I wanted to be able to talk with and thank this man who’ d brought me out of the funk I’d been in. I didn’t want to struggle or ‘God forbid’ not earn my nickname, so I trained hard during the hottest times of day. When the day came, I was forty-five pounds lighter and running eight with ease. The run was great. Raven and the other runners really made me feel welcome. I earned my nickname on that first run August 26, 2013. Raven gave me the name partly because of my job, and partly because I collapsed immediately after the run from the Miami heat and humidity (which I was not accustomed to). But I ate well, rehydrated, and returned the following day and completed the run again (without passing out afterward).” Since then, he suffered a knee injury. “No eight-mile runs for me currently, but Raven keeps inspiring me to keep trying. We converse through Facebook from time to time about music, baseball, and of course running. Thanks to him, I’m on a three-week streak of three miles a day (on my treadmill). Slow but steady!”

  * * *

  CANUCK IS A DARK-HAIRED, DARK-EYED, middle-aged, bespectacled attorney who, since 2003, has run over two hundred times with Raven while commuting from his home in Toronto. When he listens, his chin pokes out, and it has the effect of always making you feel like you’re saying something important.

  Canuck had seen Raven running during their respective evening jogs but was scared to approach him, because he thought Raven was “a bit of a freak of a guy,” recalled Canuck in an email. Then one morning at breakfast at the News Café, Canuck struck up a conversation with the waiter, who was a triathlete. “We chatted about where to train, and I told him I ran on the beach. He asked me if I ran with ‘that guy.’ ‘Which guy?’ I asked. He told me about a guy with long hair who always wore black who ran the beach every afternoon. He said that they called him ‘the Falcon.’ ”

  That afternoon, as usual, “that guy” came running toward Canuck. “As we passed each other I asked him if he was the Falcon. Looking somewhat confused, he answered, ‘No, but I am the Raven.’ ”

  Raven invited him to run. “These were pre-Internet days, and I didn’t know the story,” continued Canuck. “I showed up the next day to run with him and learned he had been running eight miles daily (same time, same place for over twenty-five years . . . as it was back then), keeping a list of all those who had done ‘a
complete,’ with memorized details of their Raven-given names, their real given names, birthdays, place of birth, and number of complete Raven Runs (and swims). Quite frankly I am still not sure what’s more impressive, the forty-one-plus years’ streak or his memorization of all of ‘the list’ details.”

  Canuck, like many of us, came to meet a legendary character and wound up finding a friend and connecting to fellow runners. “While running is the excuse, it is the people who have made this run into the special thing that it is,” wrote Canuck. “That starts with Raven and extends outward into what is now over twenty-five hundred individual stories, many of which have become intertwined.”

  NINETEEN

  WEAVER

  It was six o’clock when I listened to Raven’s voicemail. “I got your message about you not being able to run today, White Lightning,” began Raven in a breathy, desperate voice. “That’s all right. I’m still having these chest pains real bad. It’s hard to breathe. I think I’ll have to go to the emergency room tonight after the run. In case anything happens to me, Miracle knows where my writings are. I told her to give them to you. Anyways, good luck finishing your work. See you soon—I hope.”

  Who schedules an emergency room visit?

  I laced up my running shoes and grabbed my keys. Hitting the beach at 14th Street, I ran south toward the pier. Fourteen blocks later, I hadn’t seen anyone. Picking up speed, I headed north, scanning the beach for Raven’s familiar gait. His message replayed in my head, “In case anything happens to me, Miracle knows where my writings are.” The 15th Street lifeguard stand dropped behind me. Still no Raven. I passed Lincoln, 20th, and that’s when I saw a small pack of runners.

  “She’s not moonshine,” crowed the Raven, “she’s Whiiittteee Lightning!” I asked how he felt. “Better now. I just can’t breathe. Miracle’s taking me to the hospital.”

  A bony homeless man rummaged around in a trashcan on our left, and Raven called out his greetings. “Pigpen!” Pigpen, a coach, dropped a Coke can and managed a nod before returning his attention to the garbage.

  “They’ll need to run a lot of tests,” continued Raven, “hook me up to the machines and stuff.” Walter Kraft had died of a stroke at 67, and Raven figured he ran the same risk.

  “What’s going to happen if they won’t let you leave tomorrow?” I asked.

  “I’m bringing my shoes,” he said, smiling. “If it gets to five o’clock, I’ll start running in the hallways. What can they do?”

  Five hours later—just after midnight—Raven, Philly Rock, and Taxman met at the lifeguard stand to run one mile, so that if Raven needed surgery, the streak would be safe for an extra twenty-four hours. Documenting the midnight run with her camera, Yellow Rose was there, too. “It was a pretty somber mood,” she said. “Raven made a little speech that this could be his last run, and we believed it. Everyone was scared.”

  At five in the morning, Miracle drove Raven to the hospital for an angiogram. As nurses shaved a patch of Raven’s chest hair, Yellow Rose—there again with her camera—asked how he felt. “Oh, it’ll grow back,” he said.

  The procedure took a few hours with Raven under full anesthesia. When he woke up, the doctor said, “I’ve got great news. Your chest is totally clear. It looks great.”

  As soon as the IVs came out, Raven slipped on his running shoes and watched the clock. When it got to be five thirty and he hadn’t been discharged, Raven took to the hallways like he said he would and started running. “There wasn’t a lot of foot traffic,” recalled Yellow Rose. “But every time someone passed, they looked at Raven like he was crazy.” By counting his steps, Raven kept track of the distance. By the time he got the discharge papers, he’d racked up two miles in the hallway. “When the elevator doors opened, Raven shot out running to the parking lot,” continued Yellow Rose. “It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.”

  Miracle dropped him off at 5th Street, where he ran the last five with Chapter 11.

  Relieved the problem wasn’t with his heart, Raven still worried that he couldn’t breathe well. “It was the mold in his apartment,” Gringo told me. “Yeah, he had a lot of mold. You’ve seen his place, right?” I said yes. “It used to be a lot worse.” Gringo felt like he himself was living on borrowed time, which he owed to Raven. Through all of his health problems, Gringo’s one goal had been to keep running with Raven. The men had covered more than twelve thousand miles together. Gringo wanted his friend healthy.

  Armed with a mask, gloves, and clothes he threw away, Gringo showed up to clean. “We had four categories,” explained Gringo. “Baseball, the run, songs, and the history of South Beach. We were putting all these clippings into shoeboxes and crates.” As they sifted, Gringo got a lesson in history and psychology. “In Raven’s world, every single item has an importance,” says Gringo. “It helped me understand how worldly items can become a part of our real selves. If the worldly item is smashed, there is pain inside the person. And this is Raven’s world. Oh, my God, he’s got everything.”

  Gringo calls the apartment Raven’s “nucleus,” and he says Raven’s phone was like a hotline. “He had people calling him from all over,” says Gringo. “They would say, ‘You know I was reading about you, and I thought maybe you could help me. I’ve just got to stop drinking. I’m an alcoholic. I don’t know what to do.’ And it’d be very typical of Raven to say, ‘Okay, you call me once a week, and we’re just going to talk. We are going to talk.’ ”

  To Gringo, one particular anecdote sums up Raven. “At my apartment, we had cucarachas [cockroaches] on top of the freezer door. Then one day they started disappearing, and I discovered this little spider. She was eating those cucaracha babies. . . So I was just falling totally in love with this animal. She was so noble. I didn’t have the heart to destroy her. I couldn’t do it. Then she got under a glass shelf and laid a lot of eggs. The drama started. I’m almost filled with tears—that animal was so noble and so great—I can’t believe that we killed her and her eggs, and she’s gone forever.”

  Gringo had grown attached to a spider that nobody else valued. When the spider died, it crushed him. “All I could think of was Raven and his world [that] must be terrible for him,” reckons Gringo, “of people dying, storefronts that don’t exist anymore. So much that was a part of Raven is gone completely. In his house, he’s observed as being this terrible word—hoarder. But those items are part of him. They’re like my spider there.”

  For weeks Gringo cleaned pro bono. “He wouldn’t accept a dime,” says Raven. Gringo would’ve liked to continue the work, but “it was a huge time consumer,” says Gringo, adding, “I lived with a woman who was so perturbed; she didn’t want the mold coming in here, and I had mold on my clothes.” He doesn’t know how Raven survives. “He’s just a strong person, that’s all. In my opinion there should be a professional group of people that go in and ransack the whole place and clean it up if he wants to keep his health up.”

  Raven doesn’t like to let strangers in to that world. When people ask to see his home, he generally refuses. To Gringo, in this intersection of Raven’s worlds, we see a generous but conflicted person. “This is a person that really believes in what he does,” says Gringo. “He’s a real giver of himself yet he’s a very private person. I think that’s extraordinary.”

  With Gringo’s help, Raven started breathing better. “It also helped a lot to keep the apartment cooler,” says Raven, half-relieved, half-stressed over high electricity bills.

  Gringo, like a lot of longtime Raven Runners, is nostalgic for the old group and the old beach. “There used to be a real unification with the lifeguards, too,” says Gringo. “They were an intrinsic part of Raven’s run. We meant something to them. These lifeguards now, they don’t even speak. It’s a strange situation. Times change. But the old characters were wonderful.”

  Gringo doesn’t run with Raven anymore. He runs in the mornings. “I can’t be on that run with him because of his pain,” he says. With the breathing,
Gringo could help, but with the back pain, there’s no fix. Gringo doesn’t want to be complicit in making it worse and, more than that, it hurts him to see Raven hunched over. “I can’t take it. I told him I feel terrible—I adore Raven—but I’m too sensitive. Inside I’m crying all over.”

  * * *

  MIRACLE USED TO CALL THE RUN Raven’s “mistress,” though now she is completely supportive of the exercise. “It’s been a long process of understanding that every day meant every day, no exceptions—until when?” Miracle told me sitting with Raven in his living room. She used to dream of the day when Raven would stop the streak. They could travel together. “Oh, change!” she said sarcastically. “So many new horizons will open up, blablabla. But knowing him as I do, would he want to continue a life even where he had reasonably good health but wasn’t running?”

  She accepts they’re not getting younger, and she speaks of mortality so stripped of sentimentality that it makes you forget you’re talking about someone dying. “When you’re in your sixties, you can’t help but think it’s probably going to be a question of one, two, or three—one decade, two decades, or three decades at the outmost for my life. It’s not an endless horizon any longer. Of course that never was true, but we operate much of our lives under some kind of delusion of endless horizons. Time changes its role. Now I just want him to be able to run as many times as he can. He wouldn’t be who he is without the run, so why would I want this to stop?”

  His previous girlfriend never attained, or accepted, that wisdom. “Donna would always say, ‘What are you doing? You’re nuts.’ She didn’t understand.” Turning to Miracle, he continued. “But you were always supportive. More so now than ever. She knows I need to run, and it keeps me going.”