In the course of our normal activities, we all face risks—but the scope of these risks does not usually justify changing our regimen, and we make programmed decisions regarding these risks almost unconsciously. I often begin my day facing risk when I head out of my house to run at 5:30 a.m., when it is still dark and cold. Many people tell me that I am crazy, running at such an early hour. Someone could jump out of the bushes in my suburban neighborhood and assault me.
To the friends and acquaintances who warn me, I am risking my life. I would downscale that to a scraped knee. In thirty-plus years of running I have never encountered anyone or anything objectionable, unless you count the stoned or drunk kids asleep on a bench after a Saturday night of partying. I have always had at least one springer spaniel as a running companion, and I trust that the dog would protect me. Fortunately, we have never had to test that theory.
I actually worry more that my dog, Jillie, who runs off the leash, will dart into traffic and be hurt or killed. We only cross one reasonably busy street on our way to the reservoir that we circle a few times, and she has always listened to my commands to stay and go. At this point, she is thirteen and a half years old, far advanced in springer longevity, and if something happened, we would all say at her memorial gathering that Jillie died doing what she loved best.
There is a risk that a police officer cruising by will issue me a citation, or whatever the violation is, for an unleashed dog. In all these years, I have only been stopped once and the officer merely advised me that I was not in compliance with the town’s law. I thanked him for that information but never saw him again, although I see many police officers drive by who, fortunately, realize they have a more important mission than chastising a woman jogging with her dogs.
I risk smashing into or tripping over something hidden from sight in the dark. But I know my route cold and never vary from it even in the darkest of months. Of course, the fact that I run in quiet neighborhoods with few cars contributes to the darkness, but the only time I have hurt myself at all was when the town of Brookline built a sidewalk, seemingly overnight, where the street had transitioned smoothly into a pathway over a bridge. My foot smashed into the side of the step and I went flying, tearing up my shin. It hurt like hell, but I used some big leaves as Band-Aids and kept running. The scar was visible for a decade, but disappeared a few years ago.
The timing of my “risky” behavior is right, since I love being outside in the early morning, the quiet, and the chance to think—or even not to. It is also the best and easiest time of day for me to exercise. The cold almost never bothers me, although I am not one of those insane people who runs through snowstorms and wild weather conditions. I am a very experienced runner after all these years, and I get my knees checked every once in a while because of previous injuries. My early morning routine at home carries little risk.
However, when I traveled all over the world for Fidelity, I also ran in the predawn hours. I admit that this was riskier, because I was much less familiar with the terrain and sometimes got lost. The map I took from a concierge with scribbles that I could no longer read after it got sweaty inside my glove or sock usually became worthless, eliminating the “knowledge” component. I also sometimes had trouble finding English speakers that early in the morning. But even this did not fall under the heading of real danger but rather inconvenience, and, frequently, longer runs to find my way back. If the worst case was begging a security guard at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to help me return to the Okura Hotel, the risk was worthwhile.
I did not always run alone (other than with the dogs) but have had some intrepid, similarly inclined friends. My frequent running companion for years was Bob Gamere. For decades, before I ever met Bob, I knew who he was because he was the host of the popular Candlepins for Cash bowling show telecast in Boston when I was a teenager. Bob had a great mane of hair and rugged good looks, and he was also entertaining and knowledgeable, to the extent that bowling needed that level of interpretation. He had previously won the coveted job as a play-by-play announcer for the New York Yankees. The fact that he lost this and many other television positions speaks to his undeniable self-destructive streak. He was a career-wrecking alcoholic.
By the time we met in 1993, Bob had been hired and fired as a sports anchor at several local stations and was marginally employed. Nevertheless, he was always upbeat and quite the runner. He spent innumerable hours traversing greater Boston, stopping and chatting with tourists, students, and anyone else along his route who seemed interesting. He liked to jog early in the morning, did not mind the cold weather, and would meet me at a location that was convenient for me. We ran an hour or more two or three times per week for years, and trained and ran the Boston Marathon among numerous other races.
Bob was a wealth of knowledge and insight about sports, politics, and birds, and had an amazing memory for jokes. Since he once showed up at 5:30 a.m. reeking of alcohol, I gave him an ultimatum that if I could smell the alcohol, he was out of the picture and I would continue alone. He never arrived drunk again. We avoided talking about anything more personal than the occasional low-level drama with one of our kids. I never brought up the incident years before when he had been found, almost dead of several stab wounds, in the early morning hours near Fenway Park. I knew he was complicated and flawed, but he was at least as reliable as anyone else with whom I have ever participated in a sporting endeavor.
After a run on the morning of October 22, 2008, as we were about to run off in our separate ways, Bob hugged me. I thought it was odd, as he had never done that before. The stock market was in free fall so I thought he might have been trying to cheer me up. Two days later, I awoke to the clock radio’s news at 5:16 a.m., and the first thing I heard was that former sports anchor Bob Gamere had been arrested for child pornography.
When I arrived at work, I called him, and he explained that he knew this was probably going to happen, which was why he embraced me. I asked him whether the charges were true, and he said that he had never touched a child inappropriately, or attempted to. This was not the kind of conversation with which I had any experience, so I ended it before we went on to what he did do.
A week after I learned of Bob’s arrest, I received a call from a woman who identified herself as a federal court officer. She was calling about Robert Gamere’s case. I asked how I could help and she said that the judge had offered Mr. Gamere a choice between jail confinement and house arrest, and Bob had asked whether he could go jogging. The judge scoffed at that, but Bob persisted and wanted to know whether he could run if he had a guardian or someone assigned to run with him. The judge asked who that might be, and Bob answered, “Karen Firestone.” Bob’s wife, Diane, insisted that I was unlikely to ever talk to him again, never mind run with him, but Bob said that the court should ask me anyway.
Rather than address the matter of how I felt about this suggestion, I asked the court officer everything that might be relevant. She told me that I would be required to vouch for Bob’s whereabouts when he was out running, meaning that I had to be with him. He needed to be off the streets at 7:00 a.m. on weekdays and 7:30 a.m. on weekends. I could set the schedule, but needed to tell her or another court officer if the schedule changed, and I had to report any behavior not within this protocol.
I asked about the exact charges against Bob and she told me transmission of child pornography. Then I explained that I needed a few days to think about it and she replied, probably not for the first time, that he wasn’t going anywhere. I promised to call her back soon. At that point, I needed to review what was at stake and ask the advice of a few people whose opinion I valued.
In terms of the risk to me physically, I dismissed that immediately. I had been running with Bob for fifteen years and he had never touched me other than the hug, by accident, or to pick me up off the ground on the day I fainted when I had a bad cold and had not slept the night before. People might think less of me for running with him, but how would they know unless I told them, and there was no reason to talk about it. There was a risk that Bob would try to escape while we were jogging, but I was sure he could not remove his tracking device and he just didn’t seem like a flight risk to me. While he was in good shape, he was almost seventy and had slowed down significantly in the past few years.
What were the reasons to take on this assignment? Bob had erred horribly, but he had been my friend and had never done anything inappropriate to me. Much more important to me was the fact that running was the best part of Bob’s daily routine; I did not want to be the person to deny him that activity, and I was in a position to do something very positive for him. I knew he hated treadmills, and if I said no, I did not think I could live with myself.
After a couple of days, I told the court officer that I would run with Bob Gamere on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday mornings, beginning the next day, but I would need to adjust the schedule to my vacation and weekend plans. She sounded somewhat surprised by my decision. Bob was obviously thrilled that I had agreed to take on that responsibility, but we rarely talked about the case. He described how he had been the subject of an FBI sting operation targeting visitors to a child pornography web forum who shared videos and photos. The implications of the charges disgusted me, and I would not listen to Bob complain about being set up. Occasionally, we reviewed his options of either a trial or a guilty plea, which carried a mandatory federal sentence of five years in prison.
His lawyers strongly recommended the latter, because jurors—particularly female jurors—rarely sympathize with child pornography defendants. The maximum sentence was twelve years, and Bob’s attorneys worried that this outcome was possible if a jury found him guilty. We never spoke about how he felt about his situation, whether he felt remorse, or the effect on his family.
I felt truly sorry for his wife and three sons, all of whom had excellent jobs, and two of whom were married with children. Mostly, we stuck to our regular topics—whatever sports season was in progress, news stories, and local and national politics. During 2009, Bob gave me plenty of grief about being a part of the evil “Wall Street” empire that had nearly destroyed the world. It was ironic that he turned the tables so that I was somehow the guilty one.
We jogged through the winter, spring, and fall of 2009, still with no imminent sentencing date, but then Bob received notice of his court date in January 2010. He asked me to write a letter in his favor, not for leniency in the sentence, since that was fixed, but to request a prison relatively close to Boston. I went to the sentencing, which was the only time I have ever set foot in a federal courtroom, and I am not anxious to go back. There were cameramen outside snapping photos because Bob Gamere was still a recognized local celebrity. The uniformed officers led Bob away to begin his sentence in a prison several hundred miles away in rural Pennsylvania. So much for my influence.
When we communicated through the prison’s e-mail system, I carefully reread my correspondence, knowing that someone else would read it before Bob. Once in a while, he called me about some major breaking story that he knew I would find interesting. I learned nothing about his life in prison other than the fact that he taught English to other inmates and that there was a makeshift track outdoors on which he ran every day, weather permitting.
When he and Diane moved out of Brookline upon his release, I fully understood. They now live even farther outside the city, with a huge state park and incredible running trails only a few hundred yards away.
I told very few people that I was a court-assigned “guardian runner” for a man ultimately sentenced to five years in prison for an awful crime. I suspect that most people who know me would not be shocked, and would agree that I was out jogging anyway, with or without Bob Gamere. If I had broadcast my activity, perhaps it would have hurt my reputation. Instead, it made me feel better about myself. I know it made Bob feel better. I probably face more risk today, running by myself again in the dark, than I did when I was running with Bob.
We sometimes face pressure to consider risk in some predetermined way, which would have led me to say no about running with Bob. However, that would have ignored an honest evaluation of my risks and the positive impact I would have on Bob’s life. In addition, taking a risk you have calculated as small relative to the consensus, whether it is personal, professional, or an investment, can turn out to be very gratifying.