by Peter Sagal
Perhaps because it was a lifelong condition, and perhaps because its progression was so slow, but mainly because Erich is Erich, he never let his condition stop him from pursuing anything he wanted to do. Once baseball became impractical, he turned to basketball, starting as the center for his high school team (Erich is a pretty tall drink of water). But then the night blindness took over, and he found himself disoriented in the darker gyms. On a couple of occasions, he told me, he would be planted in the paint, waving for a pass, and then he would receive it right on the bridge of his nose. So, then, what came next? Swimming! A pool is brightly lit, the lanes are clearly marked, and all you really have to watch for is the big cross painted on the wall in front of you. Erich went toward swimming with the same energy he goes after anything, and even with just one year on the swim team—setting a high school record for the 50-meter freestyle that still stands—he managed to earn an athletic scholarship to Northeastern University.
(Let’s pause here to remember that I quit my high school career as a competitive runner after one year, because it was too hard and I was tired of losing. And I can see.)
After college, Erich’s journey to running was a lot like mine. He found a wife and a job and eventually there were kids, and like a lot of ex-athletes, he kept up his eating and drinking while dropping the training and found himself so overweight in his midthirties that even with perfect eyes he still wouldn’t have been able to see over his belly to his feet. Members of his family had been runners, but he had always resisted; now it seemed like the simplest, most economical way to lose the weight and get back in shape. First a mile, then two, then joining a runners’ group, then a first marathon, then another . . .
In April of 2014, at the age of forty-one, Erich had already run twelve marathons and a number of sprint and Olympic distance triathlons. In fact, it was his training for what would have been his first Ironman triathlon (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and a marathon) that tore his meniscus some months before, forcing him off his feet.I He had gained weight over the idle and indulgent holidays and started the New Year determined to get back on his feet and back in shape. He knew he couldn’t run at the level he had once reached. But like everybody else in the running world, he wanted to be on the course for the first postbombing marathon. He contacted his friend Josh Warren and asked about getting on the team for Boston 2014.
“Have I got a guide for you,” said Josh.
• • •
Like Erich and everyone else who had been anywhere near the Boston Marathon in 2013—spectators, finishers, the thousands of runners who were prevented from finishing, and most bravely, some of the wounded—I swore immediately that I would return and run it again in 2014. Having gained some small amount of attention because of my proximity to the bombing, I was determined to leverage that publicity for the sequel. I came up with a plan to recruit an “All-Celebrity Team” of running guides who would compete to raise money for Team With A Vision in the 2014 marathon. I scanned the lists of celebrity marathoners, and imagined trading good-natured trash talk with the likes of Christy Turlington and Apolo Ohno in the months leading up to the race.II
But burdened by distractions and my own general lack of discipline, I wasn’t able to pull it off. The only celebrity I successfully recruited was Drew Carey, who had in the prior years become a well-known runner, losing one hundred pounds and finishing the Marine Corps Marathon, his first, in a respectable 4:37. As a runner, Drew, who had been our guest a few times on Wait Wait, was delighted to be offered a chance to run Boston and signed up immediately, but he had to drop out a month before the race with that most familiar of excuses: he’d been invited to compete on Dancing with the Stars. (Ironically, he was voted off the night before the marathon. Should have come with us, Drew!)
So in the end, I threw myself on Josh Warren’s mercy. “Get me in this race,” I said. “Find me somebody to guide.”
Josh, unlike me, delivered. First, he was able to get me my own bib—usually a rare commodity, and almost impossible to come by this year—so I could run on my own as an official entrant. But I wanted to guide again, preferably for a veteran or someone else who had lost his sight to violence. As the Boston Marathon itself had become a battlefield in the ongoing grind of the “War on Terror,” it seemed right and proper to honor somebody who had fought in it. But military veteran para-athletes have their own organizations, such as Achilles International’s Freedom Team, so Josh had the next best thing: an athlete who was a hero in visually impaired running circles for his achievements on the roads and his advocacy for the blind, and—best of all!—because of an injury, he wasn’t planning on running that fast.
On the Friday night before the Monday race, I met Erich Manser at a reception for Team With A Vision at a mansion in Brookline, near the school the organization operates for visually impaired students. I was to speak to donors on behalf of the organization, and I was a little nervous about meeting Erich, who was delayed in getting there. Just like meeting William a year before, it felt like a first date that immediately became an arranged marriage. Mainly, I didn’t want to disappoint him, either on meeting or during the race. Finally, he entered, a tall, bearish man wearing a visor and a grin, both of which rarely left his face in the time we spent together. Unlike William Greer, who didn’t immediately register as a visually impaired person, Erich carried a white cane and had trouble finding my eyes with his as we greeted each other. We made small talk, and I introduced him to my parents and some friends who were there. “It’s nice you were able to come for the whole weekend,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Where else would I be?”
• • •
Marathon Monday I woke up (again) at my uncle and aunt’s apartment in Brookline and walked through the dark streets at 5 AM to the school for the blind a mile away, where the bus would pick us up and take us to the race. Erich was not there—since he lived in a western suburb, it made more sense for him to go directly to Hopkinton. I climbed onto the bus with fifty other guides and runners, plus support staff, and we once again traced the route by bus that we would have to retrace on our feet. So far, so similar. But when we got to Hopkinton, everything was different. Security perimeters were set up at multiple points, each guarded by armed police. We went through so many checkpoints it seemed like we were starting a race in Baghdad. Even with all our clearances and permissions, we could get no closer than two blocks from the Vision Center, where the uniformed police forced us to stop our bus and walk. About twenty-five sighted people then slowly guided an equal number of blind people as we all gingerly worked our way down the sidewalk to the comforting, warm confines of the optometrist’s office.
I was worried. In the winter of 2014, my running had become ragged. I had missed most of my runs with my group, catching up with them on weekends when I wasn’t out of town. Most of my runs were on my own, and therefore slower, and usually shorter. I’m not sure and my records don’t tell me if I even managed a single twenty-mile training run, usually essential to have any hope of success in a marathon. My running had become, really for the first time during my decade-long career as a middle-aged competitive amateur, a slog. I needed to do it, or I would become even more anxious than I already was, but my spark was dimming. The only thing keeping it aflame at all was that sense of vengeance—on the bombers, on the people who said the Boston Marathon would never be the same, and most of all on the inner voice that told me at random moments, late at night or first thing in the morning, that my grievous family losses were irretrievable. It seemed to me, without any evidence, that running the marathon again, guiding a blind runner again, crossing the line again, might restore the balance of the world to what it had been before. And that quest, that impossible dream, would have to be a workable substitute for actually, you know, training.
I had lined up to run the Boston Marathon the prior year just as the unraveling of my family had begun. I knew that what was to come in both cases would be painful, at times difficult, but I wa
s still somehow confident that it would all turn out well. William Greer and I finished in Copley Square and were greeted by an explosion. Then, a slower-moving conflagration engulfed and wrecked my family. In general, that infamous year had featured a lot of unpleasant surprises. So this time, on the morning of the 2014 race, I adjusted my expectations downward. Way, way downward. Bottomlessly so.
Erich wasn’t at the Vision Center. He was delayed, somewhere, on his own way to Hopkinton. I got myself another cup of coffee, found a quiet corner, sat down, and thought about Chris Gleason.
. . . I saw something strange to my left, a group of men kneeling on the pavement, as if in prayer, around something in the midst of them, which might have been a person . . .
Seconds later I was across the finish line, having set my triumphant 3:09 PR at the 2011 Philadelphia Marathon, and yet, throughout the next hour, amid the jubilation and bananas, I kept wondering about what I had seen. It was a person, I was sure of it, I could remember seeing his head . . . his head, yes, definitely a man, if only from the muscular arms and hairy legs. The torso had been blocked from my vision by the men kneeling around him. Men in uniforms. Police? No, not dark blue, and they didn’t have heavy equipment on their belts. Red-and-white uniforms. Red and white? EMTs? Yes. Most likely, EMTs.
At the Runner’s World postrace party, as I happily gobbled up the cookies I had been denying myself for the past four months of training, people came up to me and asked me how I did, and I told them and they marveled and grinned and congratulated me, and I asked them if they knew anything about that one guy I saw lying on the ground near the finish, in some kind of medical trouble, and eventually somebody did: the rumor was that he had died. News reports flashing across our phones confirmed it: a runner had died, right near the finish line. Witnesses said he had collapsed to the ground just before the timer above the finish line turned over three hours, so I would have passed by a few minutes later, before he could have been moved. That was definitely the man I had seen on the ground. Later news reports gave his name: G. Chris Gleason, of upstate New York.III
My fleeting encounter with Chris haunted me for months after the race. I can still see him in his last moments of life, or more likely right after them, splayed on the ground, flat on his back, peaceful, as the seemingly reverent EMTs tried to save him. I googled his name every other day for weeks, hoping a news story would be posted, explaining the cause of his death. The internet never gave that up, but I learned a lot about him: he was forty years old on the day he died, a happily married father of two small children, a lawyer, and a force in the endurance sports community of upstate New York, known for his constant presence at races, training runs, triathlons, and the chat boards and websites devoted to that community. On the day of the Philadelphia Marathon, he was already a two-time Ironman finisher, with no known medical issues whatsoever, an amateur athlete in his prime. Hell, he was fit enough to run a sub-three-hour marathon, which he would have if he had survived another hundred yards. What stopped him?
The curiosity burned hard enough for long enough that I ended up contacting his wife. Jennyfer Gleason, by then a widow for almost a year, demonstrated a grace in grief that I’ve thought about many times since and have tried (and mostly failed) to emulate. Part of it is her strong religious faith, which provides her and her children significant comfort. “It was just his time,” she told me. “God said, ‘Okay! I need you! This is it!’ So he’s up there, and getting everyone to run a little farther. ‘Be better, stronger. Don’t talk about it, do it!’ ” That explanation is at least as credible as any other, because the autopsy indicated . . . nothing. No toxicology, no hidden flaw in his heart, nothing. “His heart just turned into a bag of worms,” said Jennyfer, quoting a doctor, who was as mystified as she was.
It’s called “cardiomyopathy,” which is a medical term for “We have no idea,” and it happens, from time to time, to marathon runners, mostly male, mostly in the latter part of the race, and often right near the finish line. Some speculate that the burst of adrenaline or extra effort—just like the one I felt as I came around the curve to see the finish line, and then Chris, on the course in Philadelphia—is the tiny bit of extra stress that topples the function of the heart.
How often does this happen? A comprehensive study done by the Cardiology Division at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, studying race data from 2000–2010, shows that of the 10.9 million runners who ran a marathon or half marathon in those years, fifty-nine experienced cardiac arrest, at a rate of about one runner per 200,000. And yet, even with solid numbers of how many die in the attempt, the study’s authors concluded that “marathons and half marathons are associated with a low overall risk of cardiac disease and sudden death.” Because, as it happens, you have a much higher risk of dying of cardiac arrest if you are obese, have high blood pressure or cholesterol, and/or are indolent . . . all of which are factors that can be alleviated or eliminated by—let me check, it’s here somewhere, oh, yes here it is, what a surprise—running.
But marathoning remains special, and especially intimidating, because to run one goes far beyond what is merely required for good health or weight loss or an improved physique. To simply run makes excellent sense. To run a marathon is to go beyond sense, to risk something, maybe everything. The marathon has been associated with the risk of death ever since the event was invented by Phidippides, who came in first in a field of one and then promptly died. Whether he existed (probably) or actually ran from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of military victory before promptly expiring from the strain (probably not), the marathon, based on his legend, was born with the notion of sudden death wrapped inside it. Mortality comes standard.
Here’s something Winston Churchill actually did say, in his youth: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Such a truth implies that people seeking exhilaration will tend to put themselves in situations where they might in fact be shot at, literally or figuratively. And indeed even at my most physically and mentally exhausted, my teeth chattering and my mind blank from hypothermia (Boston 2007) or my legs rigid with cramps (New York City 2009) I was still, as I stumbled through the chute and clutched at my medal, thrilled. I had tempted fate. I had flirted with Phidippides. I had dangled myself as bait before the grim reaper, and scampered away before he could catch me. I had survived. So far.
What if today would be different? I was without question going to do something I was not adequately trained to do. I was under extraordinary stress, involved in a difficult divorce that was now in its second year and showed no sign of resolution. My journey from 2013 to 2014, from one Boston Marathon to another, had also seen me go through a complete transformation, a sudden detour into the nether regions. Dante had completed his own infernal journey by descending to its utmost depth and then piercing the border and passing through to purgatory and then heaven. Maybe I would follow. Maybe I should. So many times over the past year—on my motorcycle, on my couch—I had contemplated whether it would be better to end my particular divine comedy now before it got any worse. I had been a dramatist, once, and surviving the 2013 bombing to return to the 2014 race and then to run it all the way to the line where death would then return to claim me after my narrow escape the prior year—that was poetic, whether just or not. I could live with going out that way.
Enough, I thought to myself. Nobody was going to die today. The last thing Boston needed was more bodies.
• • •
I got up from the floor of the Vision Center’s examination room. Erich still wasn’t there. So I did a local TV interview without him, and had a bagel, and chatted with other runners and guides. There was Aaron Scheidies, one of the premiere blind runners in the country, who was looking to set the visually impaired marathon record that day; Jen Shelton, so fast she once famously outran her first guide, and arrived at the pickup point for the second guide sightless, alone, and shouting for directions. There was Ron Abramson, a wiry lawyer from N
ew Hampshire, and Dan Streetman, a former Army Ranger, who had both, like me, volunteered to be marathon guides, and unlike me, looked like they were in shape to do it.
Erich finally arrived, delayed almost an hour as he tried to get through the security cordon around Hopkinton, but seemingly unperturbed by his travails, with his grin and visor intact. As I was to learn, much like William Greer, Erich never complains, about anything, despite his surfeit of reasons. Maybe I could absorb some lessons from him; after all, he also found it difficult to see his kids. (I was known around Team With A Vision for my tasteful sense of humor.)
We went over, again, how he liked to be guided. Unlike William, he had run with guides many times, and he had a preferred technique. He carried a tether with him, a three-foot length of bungee cord with loops at each end. I would carry one end, he the other, not so much for navigational guidance—even with the many changes to the marathon security measures since the prior year, it was still the same course, pretty much a straight line from Hopkinton to Boston—but for reassurance. He was perfectly capable of putting one foot in front of the other, and running in a more-or-less straight line, just like William. But in a massive crowd, the blind or visually impaired can feel disoriented. Add to this his night blindness, which meant that what registered to me as a shadow—from a tree, say, blocking the sun just for a moment—would be for him a complete and instant blackout. Perhaps this is less true for people blind since birth, but even with Erich’s composure, confidence, and achievements, he still couldn’t help reacting viscerally to the sudden onset of the dark, and the threat of the unseen. My job was to provide reassurance as much as guidance.
