I’ve trained for 13 full marathons and many other race distances. He took out his phone and started taking video of me running while his dogs ran after us barking, probably thinking we were playing. He tried to keep pace running alongside me, and yelled “Turn down your music!” I told him to just stay away from me and he yelled, “You stay the away from me.” I told myself just keep running, so I did. I silently put my earbuds back in and kept running. He had run past his dogs to catch me just to let me know that I “can’t just run up on him like that”. I felt him run up behind and then come up next to me. I had a bad feeling, so I just kept running. Once I passed him, he yelled after me over and over again. I ran around this guy and the cute, unleashed dogs he seemed to be walking. I’ve been dreading the moment I might run into him again, wondering if he will be emboldened by our encounter. I was verbally assaulted by a white man while on a morning run. Smith loses that sense of security while traveling, especially in areas with a history of public racism.On the surface, Los Angeles is a mostly liberal town, but white privilege runs deep. Despite that, he said he has a sense of ease running in metropolitan areas like Boston and New York City. The educator said that he has always been hyper aware of his surroundings and how people perceive him while running. “I don’t feel that way running down Peachtree Street,” she said, referring to Atlanta’s main thoroughfare, as she prepared for her 2.23-mile run on Friday. She remembered worrying that a driver could easily swerve on the highway, hit her and claim it was unintentional. But the thought did cross her mind while running a relay race from Montgomery to Selma, Ala., the same route as the 1965 civil rights march. Tes Sobomehin Marshall, 42, a leader in Atlanta’s running community, said she has never worried about her safety as an African-American running in her city, where black people make up more than 50 percent of the population. “If these people feel like they want to hurt you, they will hurt you,” Owens said. He said most runners love to explore new areas, but he worries that if he does, people will think he is “scoping out the neighborhood.” And yet, he said, there is only so much he can do to protect himself. As the jeep lingered in front of him, he turned a corner and hoped it did not follow. He said that in his 35 years as a long-distance runner he had been harassed multiple times, including once during a dawn run when a jeep filled with four white men pulled in front of him and called him by a racist term. Isaiah Douglas, 58, a longtime runner and operator of heavy machinery who lives in Savannah, said that since the killing he has run largely in a local park rather than on streets to avoid confusing anyone about what he is doing. “What are they going to think? It’s not uncommon for black and brown bodies to be looked at as dangerous, and now you see a figure coming at you quickly and they are wearing a face mask.” “What if I catch somebody off guard?” said Keshia Roberson, 33, who founded a running group in Washington D.C., where residents have been asked to wear masks when in public. The case has caused runners of color to be even more vigilant than usual, spending extra time deciding where they run, what they wear, even what they sound like while they are running to try to avoid any confrontations.Īs runners laced up their shoes on Friday to run - an act they described as one of protest, defiance and mourning - there was another layer of anxiety because of the face mask recommendations brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. On Thursday, Gregory McMichael, 64, and Travis McMichael, 34, were arrested and charged with murder and aggravated assault, more than two months after the killing.
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