Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  “I was very surprised I could run four miles,” said Liz. “I almost fainted on Rock Ford hill.” She was even more surprised the next morning, when she woke up with blisters and aching calves but wanted to do it again. One evening after supper, she told her parents she was heading out for a run.

  A what?

  “My family thought it was ridiculous,” Liz said. “I was brave and went anyway.”

  This all made so little sense that Liz’s mother got a scooter and followed. Liz ran five miles that evening, with her mother scooting along behind her. “That was motivation for me, because I could run faster than she scooted,” Liz said with a laugh. That became their evening ritual, a quiet hour for Liz’s mom to glide along, away from the house chores and her eleven children, watching her strong, brave daughter fly over the roads faster than two wheels could keep up.

  The gang called itself Vella Shpringa—Pennsylvania Dutch for “Let’s All Run”—and Ame was serious about the “All” part. The baseball guys had gotten into hot water because it looked like they were breaking away from the community, wearing strange clothes and spending the weekends in “English” ballparks, so Ame wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. Vella Shpringa adopted a motto, “The joy of running in community,” which could just as well have been “Trust us, this ain’t baseball.” Rather than keeping those Sunday-afternoon runs secret, Ame reached out to other youth groups. Jake Beiler showed up because he and a friend wanted to get in shape for a coming-of-age expedition to hike the Grand Canyon. Lilian found it was a fun way to spend evenings with her boyfriend, Ben. Ame even invited Ivan, a married friend with children, because he knew Ivan liked to walk his two youngest in the stroller before bedtime. Come jog them to sleep!

  Bit by bit, Vella Shpringa began to grow. Still, the future of Amish running remained in doubt until Terry Yoder—the notorious Naked Mennonite himself—had a stroke of brilliance.

  One sweltering summer day, Terry realized that a full moon was coming. Instead of suffering through their weekly long run under the sun, he suggested to Jim Smucker, why not go by moonlight? One thing that makes Amish country so special, he pointed out, is the gorgeous night sky. Out there in the “Valley of No Wires,” as the literally wireless countryside around Bird-in-Hand is known, there are no streetlights, no phone poles, no backyard LEDs, nothing but a soft black landscape and the glorious, starry light show overhead. Jim agreed to give it a try. He and Terry had such a magical night, so breathtaking and serene, that they couldn’t wait for the next lunar cycle. They urged Ame and his gang to join them, and it wasn’t long before the Full Moon Runs evolved into a mobile monthly party.

  The first time I was invited, I arrived at Ivan’s farm just before sunset. Vella Shpringa members take turns hosting the run, shifting each month from one farm to another. The hosts map out two distances, usually about five and ten miles, and enlist their parents, spouses, kids, and neighbors to lay out a whomper of a post-run picnic while the runners are on the road. When I got to Ivan’s, thirty or so runners were on the front lawn, a mixed crew of men and women, mostly Amish and Mennonite. Everyone mingled and stretched, while veteran Vella Shpringa-ers welcomed us newcomers and partnered up to guide us so we wouldn’t go astray in the dark.

  As the moon rose, we set off. The Naked Mennonite had his shirt off before we were even out of the driveway, but no one seemed to mind. No headlamps were needed; our eyes gradually adjusted as daylight faded, until all I could see were stars, the glow of oil lamps in farmhouse windows, and the dark silhouette of ancient barns. We padded through the silence, occasionally chatting but mostly quiet, content to enjoy the sounds of the night and the satisfying rasp of our own laboring lungs.

  Suddenly, flashing lights lit up the road ahead. It looked like the scene of an accident, though I hadn’t heard a thing and couldn’t see any wreckage. “Our friends came to help,” explained Jim Smucker. “They worry about us.” The Bird-in-Hand Volunteer Fire Company knew we’d be out on the dark roads tonight, so they’d dispatched a few volunteers with emergency vehicles to safeguard some of the dicier intersections. “Got cold water, anybody needs one,” a firefighter offered, holding out a Poland Spring bottle. “Y’all are looking good. Except Jim.”

  The Bird-in-Hand fire company has always had a special bond with Vella Shpringa. For those of us in Lancaster’s countryside, our neighbors are the ones who come to the rescue when we’re in trouble. Instead of professional firefighters, we have volunteers like John Esh, my local grocer; and Jason Tucker, a lawn mower repairman; and Sam Esh, a young dairy farmer. They monitor citizen-band radios and drop tools whenever they hear a distress call, leaving everyday life behind to plunge into all kinds of trouble. But on October 2, 2006, Bird-in-Hand volunteers ran into something they’d never seen before—and hope they can someday forget. They were among the first responders to race to an Amish school when a local milk truck driver went on a killing rampage, murdering five girls and critically injuring five others before shooting himself.

  Three years after that horrible day, Jim Smucker enlisted the Amish community to help create the Bird-in-Hand Half Marathon. By modern race standards, it’s primitive. There’s no big expo full of merchandise, just a registration tent in a hayfield. There’s no get-fired-up! music, only a Mennonite family on their front porch at Mile 2 singing gospel. But Bird-in-Hand is now ranked as one of the best and most memorable races in the country, partly because of the sheer beauty of the Valley of No Wires, but mostly because of the warmth and friendliness of the Amish hosts. All the aid stations are at Amish farms, with rows of children holding out cups and chanting “Vater, vater, vater, Powerade, Powerade…” All the food for the post-race picnic—the mountains of barbecued chicken and home-baked beans, the cider doughnuts and schnitz pies—is donated and served by Amish families. Every one of the finishers’ medals is a real horseshoe that’s been hand-burnished and laced by a Vella Shpringa volunteer. Everyone goes home with a race tee reminding them of the Vella Shpringa motto, “The joy of running in community.” And every penny that’s raised is donated by the Amish community to their friends in the Bird-in-Hand Volunteer Fire Company.

  But if you think communal + joyful = slow & pokey, you should have been at that Full Moon Run. I’d chosen the shorter, five-mile route, since it was my first time and I didn’t know what to expect. It was a warm night and I was struggling to keep up with Jim and Lilian, who didn’t seem bothered by the heat even though she was in her heavy dress, apron, and starched headcovering. When we got back to Ivan’s farm, I was glad to find a table in the driveway loaded with jugs of lemonade. I gulped down a cup and was about to make a hard move on the food table when I heard a stampede behind me. Ame and the other ten-mile runners were already storming down the driveway, finishing ten miles in barely more time than it took me to run five.

  “Man, those guys are getting quick,” I remarked to Jim.

  “This? This is just fun. Wait till you see them race.”

  Everything the Amish have learned over the past three hundred years about how to rely on their own bodies and build them into high-performance machines, the Vella Shpringa gang has applied to running. And it’s paying off beautifully: Ame has sliced a full hour off his marathon best, improving from 3:59 to a sizzling 2:54. Ben Zook wanted to see if a tall, muscular runner like him could break five minutes in the mile and three hours in a marathon; within a year, he’d nailed both. As a six-man team, the Amish runners have won three Ragnar Relays covering distances from 128 to 200 miles. Leroy Stoltzfus was even featured in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” when he was spotted near the front of the pack in the Harrisburg Marathon in his long pants and suspenders, finishing in just over three hours. Several times, Liz has shown up at the starting line of 5Ks and 10Ks in her full-length dress and outrun every other woman in the field to win.

  “She’d do very well in fifty-mile races,” said Ame, who has run a hundred-miler himself. �
��She’s a really good distance runner.” Vella Shpringa runners once road-tripped to the Niagara Marathon because they’d heard it was a fast course, only to get battered by a bitter headwind. The guys struggled to finish, then turned around to find Liz right behind them with a grin on her face and a 3:30 personal best.

  “It took me eight tries to qualify for Boston. She did it on her first,” Ame marveled. Boasting is way non-Amish, but when it comes to Liz, Ame can’t resist. Besides, war stories are half the secret of Vella Shpringa’s success. That’s a little hack the Amish figured out long before they got into running: Dreams are the beginning of every new adventure, and our greatest dreams come from the person right in front of us. The Amish don’t watch TV or movies, or even listen to the radio, so their sole source of entertainment is the tales they tell one another. No wonder Vella Shpringa has grown so quickly; nothing is more inspiring than hearing your buddy tell a story while you’re thinking, Well, hell. If he can run ten miles in the dark, why can’t I?

  Amos and Liz, fifty miles into Amos’s first hundred-mile ultramarathon

  That night at the Full Moon Run, we’re all free to head off as soon as we finish, but even though it’s late on a work night and a bunch of these guys still have to scooter home, no one leaves until we’ve followed two traditions. First, everyone waits in the driveway for the last straggler to make it in. Then, we load up on food and sprawl on the grass in our sweaty clothes, looking up at the stars and trading tales as Ivan passes around more of that insanely delicious salsa he made from his own garden vegetables.

  After one of these nights, Ame invited Liz and her sister, Emma, to join him and some friends for a run on a beautiful but very rocky route on the historic Conestoga Trail. It was a rainy Sunday, making the slick stones treacherous, and barely a mile into the woods, Ame suddenly flew off the steep embankment and crashed down into the creek. The other runners were scrambling down to help him when he emerged with something in his hand: a heart-shaped rock. He held it out to Liz, and asked her to marry him.

  Liz said yes, but Ame being Ame, he wanted to finish the rest of the six miles before going home to tell their families. “After that, she was so overjoyed I could barely keep up with her,” Ame told me. “Fastest run I’ve ever had with her.”

  On their wedding day, Liz and Ame met at three thirty in the morning for a six-mile run. For Ame, it was a chance to reflect on just how weird his life had become. Normal would have meant ghosting off on his own to indulge this taboo little fascination of his, the way Jim Smucker’s uncle did, before eventually giving it up and returning to Amish tradition. But Ame took a chance, and instead of hiding a shameful little secret of his own, he created something big and joyful for everyone else. He found the true Amish-ness at the heart of running, and his own running took off.

  “For us, it’s very unusual to do things alone,” Liz once told me. “We’re used to working together and having our fun as a group. That’s the only reason I began running in the first place. I enjoyed those afternoons with my friends.”

  But early that morning it was just the two of them, side by side in the dark, before the sun came up and the buggies began to arrive. Then it was time for Liz and Ame to rejoin their families, their friends, and fellow runners, and begin their next adventure.

  14

  Matildonkey

  “What do you think?” I asked Tanya. “Bad idea?”

  “Maybe,” she said, as she struggled to settle Flower. “This could be a looong night.”

  In early November, two months after Sherman arrived, I volunteered to host the Full Moon Run. We’d brought the donkeys out of their pasture in advance and tied them to the gate beside the driveway, but as the minivans pulled in and Amish runners piled out, phantom-like in the dark in their black pants and jackets, Sherman and Flower went on red alert, their ears shooting straight up like they were being robbed at gunpoint. Too weird, they decided, and began squirming, trying to bust free of their halters.

  “Put them back?” I asked.

  “Ah, let’s go for it,” Tanya said. “It’ll either work great, or fail fast.”

  I’d wanted to try donkey running with the Vella Shpringa crew because I was hoping they could solve a structural design flaw we’d encountered with Tanya: we couldn’t figure out a way to split her in two. During our training sessions with Sherman, Tanya and Flower needed to ride up in front so Sherman would follow. At the same time, I needed Tanya to bring up the rear so she could correct my mistakes. I was still a rookie with this ground-driving business, and every once in a while, I’d find myself tangled in the rope and turned around backward with no idea what the hell just happened.

  But the Amish guys have been training horses since they were kids, and Vella Shpringa brought another rare skill to the table: because they’re such strong runners, they might be able to work with Sherman on the open road, trotting along behind him instead of walking in circles in a corral. Just by luck, I might be living next to an undiscovered talent pool of expert burro racers: where else are you going to find master horsemen with Boston Marathon speed? It was a good thought, undermined only by the dumb-assery of forgetting that donkey training may not combine too well with darkness. We’d never taken Sherman and Flower out at night before, and when headlights dazzled their eyes and they were suddenly surrounded by shadowy strangers, they began to freak.

  “Is that the famous Sherman?” someone called.

  A van door slammed, and out of the darkness came Jake Beiler, one of Vella Shpringa’s unofficial group leaders. Jake is tall and slender, but strong as a grizzly; one year at the finish of the Bird-in-Hand Half Marathon, Jake nearly single-handedly upended me and dunked me headfirst in the water-bottle barrel to cool off. Jake saw the donkeys were fretting and took command. He quickly switched off his headlamp and kept his hands low, approaching slowly. He moved his head around until he caught Sherman’s eye, locking gazes to let Sherman know he wasn’t in any danger.

  “So this is our new friend,” Jake said, his voice low and reassuring. Sherman eyed him warily but held still when Jake stroked his head and scratched him under the jaw. Around us, vans and pickup trucks continued to arrive, filling the driveway and squeezing into rows across the lawn in front of the house. The murmur of voices grew louder, a stew of English and Pennsylvania Dutch, as runners who hadn’t seen one another since the last full moon traded greetings and loosened up.

  Jake gave Sherman’s noggin one last scruffing, then went to call everyone together. “If we’re doing this, let’s go now,” Tanya said. “We’re going to need a head start.” Sherman and Flower had given up trying to escape and begun trying to hide behind each other, circling around nose to butt and tangling their ropes into spaghetti. The only way to calm them, Tanya thought, would be to get out ahead of the group and see if we could coax the donkeys into a running groove before everyone else caught up with us.

  “Okay,” I told Tanya. “Let’s see how far we get.”

  I quickly explained our plan to Jake and my superhuman mutant ninja friend, Steve, a seventy-one-year-old retired watchmaker who’s so indestructible that he once joined me on a seven-mile trail run even though his arm was in a sling from a freshly broken collarbone. The day before, Steve and I had taken a big sack of flour and laid out two routes along the backroads, chucking out handfuls to mark directions for five or eight miles. Under the moonlight, the flour should be visible enough for everyone to follow the turns without me.

  “Give us about a twenty-minute lead, then turn everyone loose,” I told Steve and Jake.

  I unknotted Sherman’s rope and yanked it free from the gate. I turned to make sure Flower and Tanya were set, while Sherman began trotting down the driveway—

  And kept on trotting. As soon as he realized he could outrun the commotion behind him, the Wild Thing was off. I watched him go, so impressed by his speed and initiative that it took a few beats before I
realized the rope was about to jerk out of my hand as Sherman disappeared into the dark. I sprinted after the fugitive, while Tanya swung herself onto Flower and joined the pursuit. When I caught up with Sherm, he didn’t seem to be escaping; he was clip-clopping happily along like a thoroughbred on parade. I bent down and grabbed the rope, but he never broke stride, cruising steadily at a crisp jog.

  “What’s he up to?” I asked Tanya.

  “Beats me,” she said. She held Flower back to see if Sherman would slow down and let his girlfriend lead, as usual, but he seemed oblivious. After about a quarter mile, we hit a long grinder of an uphill slope and Sherman didn’t hesitate; he shifted into climbing gear and streamed along so smoothly, I was gasping to keep up.

  “Holy crap,” I panted. “What’s gotten into him?”

  “Anything to mess with your mind,” Tanya replied. “That’s donkeys. Never what you expect.”

  We crested the hill and kept flowing. It was a gorgeous evening, with the valley below us glowing silver in the moonlight, but Tanya’s mind kept circling back to Sherman. “Nighttime probably lets him focus,” Tanya speculated, keeping her voice low. We were both whispering, afraid to jolt Sherman out of whatever voodoo trance he was in. “Tunnel vision. All he’s sensing is Flower and the road ahead, so he doesn’t have to process all the scary stuff he sees in the daytime.”

  Sherman ignored us, barreling straight into the night, a donkey on a mission. Only at Mile 2 did I spot the first danger sign: Sherman’s ears perked up and swiveled back, detecting some menace in the silence around us. A few moments later, a shout rang out.

  “Finally!” a distant voice called, and then I heard pattering feet. The first Amish runners were closing in fast, surging into view as they topped the hill behind us. I tightened my grip on Sherman’s rope, prepared to haul back if he got spooked, but other than the ear twitch, he didn’t flinch.