“Being present while running connects you to your body, mind and surroundings. I find deep inspiration from nature and often feel wonderfully overwhelmed with the sheer beauty of it all. When I step out the door, it’s so much more than a run.” — Sarah Attar
I didn’t want to write about this.
Not because I don’t think the subject is important — it is. I didn’t want to do anything that might in any way add to the grief of Mollie Tibbett’s family, who are in the midst of something no family should have to go through.
But I remembered the beautiful sentiment above, expressed by professional runner and nature photographer Sarah Attar to author Mackenzie L. Havey in her recent book “Mindful Running,” and it made me think.
I’ve been for runs in some of the most beautiful places in the country and even around the world, from the streets of Charleston, S.C., to New York City and even Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I’ve run in the backwoods of national parks and little parks in the Ozarks of Arkansas.
In all those places, I’ve run alone. Many times. And never once have I felt unsafe. Why? Because I’m a fairly big guy and no one on the street is going to even give me a second look, much less harass me.
Because I’m a man, I get to lace up my shoes and go out for a run anytime I want to experience the thing Attar describes so eloquently above.
But half the population doesn’t get to do this. They must always have one eye open for the suspicious-looking character described so well in a New York Times piece from this week, “Running While Female”:
“Just as our bodies learned how to sprint around the curve of a track, our muscles learned to tense up when men honked their horns as they passed us. And just as we learned to use that nervous feeling in our gut before a race to propel us across the finish line, we also recognized the gut feeling that told us a trail wasn’t safe to run on alone.
“We know that we can never totally zone out on a run, to enter that magical out-of-body Zen space fueled by endorphins, without keeping at least part of our mind firmly on earth. We know we have a set of rules about personal safety of which our male runner friends are, for the most part, unaware.”
I’ve had friends who have experienced exactly this. Twenty years ago, a woman I know was out running when she was attacked from behind and dragged into some woods just off the road; thankfully she was able to kick her attacker in the groin and get away before anything more serious could happen.
And things less dramatic — but still worrisome — have happened closer to home. Last fall, my stepdaughter went out for a run around the neighborhood and when she got back, she told me that some boys in a Jeep had catcalled at her when she stopped at an intersection. She’s 13 years old.
The reason I put those two episodes together isn’t just to show how little things have changed since twenty years ago. It’s to highlight the fact that had they not been alone, these incidents likely wouldn’t have happened.
That’s crazy.
Tayla Minsberg, the writer of the piece above, talks about the dual fear women feel when incidents like what happened to Mollie Tibbetts occur — not only is the event itself frightening, but the public response to it always shifts to putting the onus back on women to be more careful when running.
Why do we tolerate this?
And this Twitter thread by a journalist who says she’s given up running thanks to the fear of what might happen ought to give us all pause:
Why does the debate always seem to take this turn? Why doesn’t anyone talk publicly about asking for something better from men?
It goes even further than that: why shouldn’t women be able to enjoy the kind of freedom that Sarah Attar describes in the opening quotation above?
The answer, of course, is they should.
It goes without saying that all men aren’t responsible for the actions of the terrible few who commit crimes. But I think I speak for most men when I say that’s an easy answer to a really difficult question.
When we’re honest with ourselves, men know that bad guys like the one who attacked my friend twenty years ago don’t just wake up one day and out of the blue decide to attack someone. And while you can’t blame all teenage boys for all the ills of society either, situations like the one I describe above with those boys in that Jeep are the seeds from which those attitudes take root.
I wish I had a magic wand I could wave that would end all harassment tomorrow. But the fact that I don’t perhaps adds even more responsibility on my shoulders; because no one is coming to save us and make this all go away, it’s on every one of us to do something about it.
I can think of where I might start — refusing to tolerate things I might have ignored in the past, and raising my 4-year-old son right, for starters.
Every little thing we do and say matters, I’ve come to understand. All the little things we think are nothing add up. When we put something out into the universe, even if it’s just our own world of our family, friends and co-workers, it travels.
The problem can loom so large that it seems unsolvable. And perhaps it is, for the time being anyway. But we at least have to try.
Thanks for listening to me on this — I’d love to hear your thoughts on it too.
Your friend,
— Terrell