ONE OF THE FEW good reasons I can think of for running twenty-six miles would be to escape being shot in the head. But Dennis Rainear, twenty-eight years old, of Midland, Michigan, runs such distances for his own gratification. And when somebody did shoot him in the head, after ten miles on November 4, he kept on running.
The .22-caliber slug in his scalp slowed him down enough over the last sixteen miles, though, that he took 3 hours 9 minutes to finish the Grand Valley Marathon in Allendale, Michigan. That time was nine minutes too slow to qualify for the Boston Marathon next April.
“I was all prepared,” Rainear was quoted as saying when he finished the race. His best previous marathon time had been 3 hours 31 seconds. “I was sure I could knock 31 seconds off my time, and then this silly thing had to happen.”
On reading this statement, I finally had to break down and admit that I was impressed by the running state of mind. Just when running was becoming more boring as a sports topic than what is wrong with the Giants, just when the average non-running American was firming up several good reasons why he was not out there pushing past pain barriers in perfectly fitted shoes himself, here comes Dennis Rainear. Here comes a runner who is so absorbed in biting the bullet that he can’t be bothered by the bullet in his head.
“This silly thing,” he calls it. It seems to me that being shot in the head, when it occurs, should be a big thing in a person’s life. To a nonrunner, it would make more sense to hear someone say, “All my life I have been trying to avoid getting shot in the head, and here it has to happen while I’m running this silly race.”
I wanted to know more about Dennis Rainear. Maybe all this was a hoax, and I could stop worrying about it. I called him at the Dow Corning Company in Midland, where he works as a chemist.
He said he had been having trouble getting much chemistry done lately—not because of his wound but because of his fame.
“You’ve been getting a lot of calls on this thing?”
“Is the sky up? I’m hearing from about every newspaper and magazine and TV show in the country.”
The story was true, he said.
“I don’t know exactly where the bullet came from, because I don’t know which way I was facing or what the angle of my head was when it hit. But it landed just to the right of the top center of my head. I remember there being a thud when it struck me, and it damn near took me off my feet, I thought I’d been hit by a brick or something.
“I looked around to see who’d thrown it, but there was nobody there. Other than yell a little bit, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to take the time to do anything anyway. But I had trouble focusing my eyes. It was like I was drunk. I kept blinking. And I kept opening my jaw, trying to get my ears to pop.
“I’ve had worse races, in the heat, when I really felt wracked. But I ran through a really bad period at the twenty-two-mile mark. I was wobbling, and my eyes were going in different directions. I assumed it was undertraining, or overfatigue, or dehydration. So I slowed down to a walk, but that made it worse. I thought: ‘The blood must be pooling in your legs. Running will help pump it back up to your brain.’
“So I started running again, and I felt better. I thought, ‘I must have run through whatever it was I was in.’
“When I crossed the finish line my wife knew immediately I was disappointed. ‘By the way,’ I told her, ‘somebody clobbered me with a brick or something.’
“I had a big goose egg. So we had the physician who was there look at it. ‘I can see something shining in there,’ he said. All of a sudden things really made sense. It wasn’t just muscle fatigue.”
At the hospital Rainear was taken to, X rays showed a slug flattened up against the skull. “The doctor had to use plastic tweezers to pull the bullet out so it wouldn’t be damaged for the ballistics tests. He had a hard time. He kept jerking my head, jerking my head.”
Fortunately the slug had hit a solid part of the skull and hadn’t penetrated at all. “All I’ve got now is a small scab. I’ve been out running every day. The other day I was out on a new road, and I heard a gunshot crack. I hightailed it out of there. I figure I’ve used up my luck.”
Rainear assumes that the bullet that hit him was a stray. “I could as easily have been hit sitting in a bar somewhere. Some of the stories that have come out have concluded that running is no longer safe—that if you go out running, ipso facto you’re going to get shot.”
Rainear deplores such conclusions. It’s true that when he is training, people occasionally try to run over him, or they open their car doors as they drive past to try to bowl him over, and he is a bit worried that “some nut” watching his next race will say, “Okay, you took a twenty-two bullet; try this thirty-ought-six.” Still, Rainear thinks that “running is the best thing going.”
“It’s free-form exercise. It’s great for cardiovascular fitness. And it’s cheap. Anybody can do it. I’m just the average Joe on the road, and I’ve run races with Bill Rodgers, Lasse Viren, Frank Shorter, all the big shots.”
I suggested that he would be something of a celebrity himself at the next Boston Marathon, in which he will compete by virtue of a special invitation.
“No,” he says, “I still consider myself a little shot.”