I have a right to be here

A year of running in 2024

This newsletter is my fifth annual reflection on a year in running. Here are my reflections from 2020 (a year of disaster), 2021 (a year of quitting), 2022 (a year of hit and runs), and 2023 (learning not to run alone).

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Nearly every day for the last 20 years, I have put on my shoes and gone outside for a run or a walk.

So often when I am out on the streets a car comes a little too close. A truck will turn without looking. A woman at a four-way stop looking at her phone will accelerate before she looks up. It’s a small city, so often my neighbors honk and wave. But sometimes so do men leaning out the side of their trucks, yelling, “Slut!” as I heave up a hill in a sports bra. Every honk makes me wince now. I have to explain to friends: Don’t honk when you see me — it terrifies me. I think I am going to die.

This year, I ran in Iowa.

In 2022, for three months I was stalked by a man in a white truck. By the time the police were able to get him to stop, it was June and the Dobbs decision had been released. I went to a protest and there I saw a man in a Ford Raptor drive through a group of protesters as they crossed the street to go back to their cars. I had just stepped on the curb when I turned to look for a friend and saw the driver, window down, lurching and through a crowd of people. I saw him scream. I saw people try to stop him. Two women fell. One had her foot crushed. For the next year, as she recovered, she struggled to pay her medical bills.

I ran in Wisconsin.

The next year, I went to the trial and heard that man claim that we were the terrorists, an angry mob of women, furious, attacking him in his truck. He was the one who felt afraid. A jury agreed. He was found not guilty. The donations I had quietly helped raise to pay the medical bills of one of the victims were brought up in the trial by the defendant’s lawyer as a way to imply that she had only been looking to get rich.

How did we, the straggling group of people on our feet, become the terrorists, and the man in the large truck with power to kill us become the victim? How did we lose our right to be in the street? How did he get the right to run us over?

We’d been walking to be seen. To make our physical presence known. So, of course, in the mind of the driver and the jury, we’d women had gotten what we’d asked for.

But still, nearly every day, I put on my shoes and go outside.

Last year was my second year running Relay Iowa. It’s an annual event where teams of runners work to run 339 miles across the state of Iowa and raise money for charities. The past two years, I’ve been on a team that’s raised tens of thousands of dollars for abortion access and trans mutual aid.

Starting off Relay Iowa in Sioux City.

But every June, as teams of runners stipple across the hot heaving Iowa roads, a truck will get too close and shout obscenities. This year, as we ran through the city of Dubuque nearing the finish line, a man let his dog chase me and another runner; another man from his yard screamed and told runners to get off the road.

The event organizers have now changed the route to keep runners out of the city as long as possible. Away from the rage and fear. Away from the trucks and cars that hurtle at us, crowding us, letting us know that even in this big empty state, there isn’t room for people who don’t travel like they do.

In her book Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit writes, “Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.”

There are bodies that America believes should not be unhindered. Black and brown bodies; gender nonconforming bodies; bodies with uteruses.

The news is filled with anger at these bodies unhindered in our country — crossing borders, getting abortions, walking down the street, existing outside gendered conformity. These bodies laughing. These bodies taking time to run or take the path through the woods to the park. These bodies in the middle of the work day, running, hopping over cracked sidewalks and stepping over potholes. It’s a freedom our neighbors begrudge us, peering out the windows, posting on social media when they see us.

Since 2005, I have been running the same routes through this city. I know exactly which way to go to take me 6 miles, how to go through downtown to get to 10 miles. I have a 3.3 mile route that goes through my neighborhood and a 2.5 mile route for dog walks while I listen to audiobooks.

I walk to the Walgreens and I walk to the pizza place. I walk to the Irish bar in my neighborhood where the waitresses like to ask me if I’ve gotten a real job yet and buy my wine when I tell them about my recent dates. I’ve begun to walk to the Starbucks that just opened where the Arby’s used to be.

I know this city with my body. Every run and every walk is a narrative traced through the roads, sidewalks, and neighborhoods. I’ve watched neighbors whose names I’ve never known age and then disappear from the chairs on their porches. Golden retrievers and their owners who lope along the sidewalk get old, then they too disappear. Eventually, the neighbor appears again, this time with a puppy. Houses renovated. Gardens torn out and replanted. Trees uprooted by natural disasters replaced with new ones that I am now watching grow.

This year, I ran more than I ever have. I ran Relay Iowa and trained for and ran two marathons. Well, one marathon — I mostly walked with my friend Morgan through the city of Savannah, Georgia. The landscape was alternately beautiful and terrifying. Charming moss-covered lanes and deserted streets, and even along a highway that had been closed off for the race.

Even without the presence of the cars, the women (and it was the Every Woman’s Marathon) stuck close to the side of the road, terrified to occupy the middle of the road. A few women, including me, ran into the highway, giddy with freedom, only to dart back to the side. It felt like we’d broken a law. And we had. We’d taken up space. We’d been free women on a highway, with nothing but our bodies, our own feet carrying us along.

I ran in Los Angeles.

I think of the times women have been blamed for their rapes or attacks simply because they’d been bodies in public. Simply because they’d been walking or jogging along the road. Before the marathon took us to the highway it had taken us by a church where a group of 20-something men shouted at hot women, declaring they were single. Women’s bodies in public, outside, have always been sexualized. Viewed as a performance for men.

Don’t go out alone. Don’t go out at night. Go with a friend. Drive. Take a car. Take a taxi. Take a weapon. Take mace. Every piece of advice designed to scare us from existing in public. This is a society that would rather force women inside than stop men’s violence.

No wonder we felt giddy running in the middle of the road — for one wild moment we’d forgotten our place and let ourselves be free.

This year ended with two men in two different American cities using their cars as weapons of terror. One struck and killed people who were walking down the street. Doing nothing more than existing.

In 2023, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association, the number of pedestrians struck and killed by drivers was up 14.1% over 2019 — the last pre-pandemic year. In a 2021 report, The Boston Globe noted that car rammings of protesters were up significantly, with many states passing laws to protect the drivers and the justice system all too often clearing them of any charges.

Vehicles are more dangerous than they used to be. The looming front bumpers and wide, unwieldy metal expanses of trucks and SUVs are a major factor in why pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. have been climbing steadily, in 2022 reaching their highest level in more than 40 years. And according to NPR, “The number of pedestrian deaths is growing faster than traffic fatalities overall, jumping more than 80% since 2009.”

After the tragic death of Laken Riley, a young woman murdered by an immigrant while she was out on a run, lawmakers have focused on punishing other immigrants. The reality remains that a woman is far more likely to be murdered by her male partner than a stranger. The reality remains that the greatest danger is inside our own homes. But the cultural narrative wants us to believe our freedom to be unhindered bodies in space is the threat. It urges us inside. It urges others inside, back into hiding, back across borders.

It feels important to keep walking and running in these streets. I don’t want to retreat. I don’t want to cede my freedom. I want to keep being a body in public, writing a narrative on the streets with my feet, that declares, I am here. I have a right to be here.

And I ran in California.