Flashes of Panic

I got a press release yesterday about a fall cross-country “running initiative … featuring a tribute to cross-country runner Ryan Shay.” Shay, for anyone who has been out of touch with the American running community since last November, was a former national marathon champion and NCAA 10,000m champion who died of an apparent heart attack five miles in to the Olympic Marathon Trials in New York.

Meanwhile, on August 21, an anniversary passed unmentioned: that’s the day last year when Jenny Crain was hit by a car when training in Milwaukee. Crain had been a national-level athlete for as long as I’ve been in the sport, but a year after her accident she’s still on her recovery road.

I met Crain very briefly; she was on my flight back from Fukuoka in 2006. I don’t remember her official role, but she spotted me talking to one of the junior team managers and automatically included me in the friendly group of Americans navigating through our connection in Osaka, even though I wasn’t officially part of their group. I doubt she would remember my name or even necessarily my face, but I appreciated her friend-until-proven-otherwise approach.

Nobody has named a shoe after Jenny Crain. There weren’t any soft-focus up-close-and-personal segments interrupting the women’s 10,000m in Eugene in June (or the women’s marathon Trials in Boston in April) about Crain’s accident, her career, a spouse left behind. No national magazines have sent feature writers to Milwaukee to talk to the Crain family and analyze the accident report.

And frankly, I’m not sure why not. Crain’s about an order of magnitude more photogenic than Shay ever was. The redemption story on the Shay side (widow Alicia returns to inspiring victories somewhere?) is much less of a sure thing than it is on the Crain side (Jenny walks unassisted! Jenny runs again!)

Maybe it’s that Crain was just one runner in the Adidas stable, while Shay was one of the best Saucony sponsored. Maybe it’s that Crain was out on a training run on busy streets, while Shay was in a major televised race with all his peers. Maybe it’s that Shay had titles on his resume, while Crain was something of a journeyman, always in the money but seldom in the front. Maybe (whisper it) it’s that we still take men more seriously than women as professional athletes and heroes.

Maybe it’s because we know that however much or little we do in Ryan Shay’s memory, the outcome is the same: we can’t bring him back. But we’re afraid we can’t do enough for Jenny Crain.

And with medical bills which must verge on the catastrophic themselves, and a story which could just as easily be that of any runner who’s in the right place at the wrong time, it seems to me that Crain deserves to be remembered just as much, if not more, than Ryan Shay.

Now Playing: I Figured You Out by Mary Lou Lord

Update, November 2009: Over a year later, I’m happy to be proven wrong on at least one of the above statements. Runner’s World sent John Brant, possibly the best writer I can imagine for the job, for a feature story which was in this month’s magazine. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to read it.

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