Charlie Engle - Running Man: A Memoir

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Copyright 2016 by Charlie Engle

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First Scribner hardcover edition September 2016

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Interior design by Erich Hobbing
Jacket design by Thomas Colligan
Jacket photograph by Rod McLean

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-8578-3

ISBN 978-1-4767-8580-6 (ebook)

For Momma

Bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE ,
Julius Caesar

PROLOGUE

I always heard the keysthose awful jangling keyscoming toward me, then fading as the guard moved down the corridor. I learned to block out the big bald guy who banged on his locker half the night and the scrawny dude in the corner always yelling something about Jesus. But no matter how exhausted I was or how hard I had crammed the foam earplugs into my ears, I heard those damn keys. It wasnt the sound itself that got me; it was that the keys were attached to a guardand where there was a guard, there might be trouble.

The keys meant it was 5:00 a.m.head count. I peeked out from under the corner of the blindfold I had made with a strip of gray cloth ripped from a pair of old sweatpants. Lots of inmates left their lights on all night; some were reading or writing, some prowling around, doing things I was not interested in knowing about. The blindfold helped me escape all that. I saw the guard moving away from my cellblock. Good. Not my turn to be harassed.

I lifted the cloth off my eyes, dug out my earplugs, and lay motionless on my top bunk, listening to the two hundred other men in my unit stirring. My cellmate, Cody, an affable kid who had been slammed with a ten-year sentence for buying weed, was still snoring in the bunk beneath me. Through the high, dirt-flecked double-paned window in my cell, I could see a square of black sky.

- - -

Just before I reported to Beckley Federal Correctional Institute, I had been a guest speaker at a big AA meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the refreshment table, a burly, tattooed guy came up to me and told me to make sure I got a nickname in prison.

Whys that? I had asked as I helped myself to an Oreo from a paper plate.

You get yourself a nickname so that when you get out of the joint and youre walking down the street and somebody yells out your prison name, you ignore that son of a bitch and keep on walking.

In the three months I had been locked up, I had encountered a Squirrel, a Shorty, a Pick-n-Roll, a Swag, a Gut, a Tongue, a Beaver, and a Glue Stick. They called me Running Man. I was the middle-aged white guy who ran laps alone on the quarter-mile dirt track in the prisons recreation yard, past the smirking smokers and the guys playing hoops. When we were in lockdown, I was the fool pounding out miles on the hard floor next to my bunk.

You dont belong in prison, an inmate I knew as Butterbean said after watching me run in place for more than an hour. You belong in a fucking insane asylum.

Running Man. They couldnt know how well it fit me. I had been running all my life; trying to find something, trying to lose something. Running helped me kick a ten-year addiction to cocaine and had kept me sober for going on twenty years. Running saved my lifeand then it gave me a life. On the outside, people in the ultrarunning world knew who I was. Id run across the Sahara Desert, setting records along the way. I had been on Jay Leno. I had paid sponsorship deals, now long gone. I was getting hired to give inspirational speeches to auditoriums full of pharmaceutical salesmen, war heroes, corporate bigwigs, and weekend warriors. In prison, runningthinking about running, reading about running, writing about runningwas the only thing I had left.

One morning, just before 10:00 a.m. head count, I was on my bunk reading a Runners World magazine article about Badwater, the 135-mile ultramarathon that takes place in Death Valley, California, every July. Lots of people think its the toughest race in the world, and I wouldnt argue with them. The course starts below sea level and ends at Whitney Portal, a lung-busting 8,300 feet up Mount Whitney. The blacktop in the desert is so hotoften more than two hundred degreesit can melt the soles off your shoes and blister the skin off the bottoms of your feet. Id run Badwater five times and placed in the top five all but once. I loved that race and the people who ran it. I thought of myself as part of the big, crazy Badwater family.

I was still thinking about Badwater when I went out to run that afternoon. I had two hours before I had to be back in my cell for 4:00 p.m. count. From the grassy place where I always did my warm-up stretches, I could see the rooftops of a few houses on a distant ridge. Sometimes I even heard music drifting up from the wooded valley below. The track was the only place I could almost convince myself that I wasnt in prison.

I started to run, easy at first, then faster. I felt the sun on my face. I let myself think about Badwater, about the wavering heat and the beckoning horizon. I pictured the hazy mountains looming over Furnace Creek and the furrowed dunes of Stovepipe Wells and that long, desolate climb up to Townes Pass. I remembered the desert light: russet at dawn, lavender at dusk. I thought about winding my way up Mount Whitney, knowing that with every S-curve, the torturous climb was closer to being done. And I remembered the pain. I ached for that exquisite, illuminating pain now, the kind that exposes who you really areand asks you who you want to be.

About five miles into my run, I picked up the pace. And I started to hear something in my head I had heard beforea sound like the whir and clatter of a spinning roulette wheel, with the metal ball rolling in the opposite direction of the wheel, waiting to drop into play. You think you know where the ball is going to land, but then it bounces around and settles in a place you never saw coming. In my mind, I saw the ball ricochet and hop and, finally, land. I stopped running. Breathing hard, I clasped my hands behind my head and looked up at the sky. I would run Badwater this year after all. Yeah. Hell , yeah.

I would run the race on this shitty dirt track. I calculated the distance in my head. It would mean doing 540 laps, probably about twenty-four total hours of running over two days. Id have to call in some favors and Id have to fit it all in between head counts, but with some luck, I thought I could do it. I started to run again and felt a familiar happiness wash over me. It was the buzz I always got when I committed to a big race. This time it came with an oddly exhilaratingand undeniably ironicsense of freedom: there were no entry fees, no application, no crowds, no airport security lines, no Twitter feed, no fund-raising, no finishers medal, no pressure. All I had to do was run 135 miles. On the morning of July 13, 2011, the first day of the Badwater race, I would be standing on a starting line of my own.