The Run 4 Boulder Strong 10K Remembrance Run in images and impressions
It's just a change in me, something in my liberty
A scene in the 1994 film Clerks depicts Randal, a caustic and boastfully neglectful video-store employee, informing his best friend Dante, the register jockey at the adjoining convenience store, that he plans to attend a party. Dante, no paragon of diligence but a moral superstar compared to Randal, exclaims “But you hate people!”
“Yes, but I love gatherings,” Randal smirks in return. “Isn't it ironic?”1
My outlook shares aspects of the portrayal of Randal’s disconnect: People persistently entice him, even if he doesn’t know why since he openly scoffs at everyone’s most mundane individual failings. I like people to not experience unfair obstacles to flourishing and hate to see them purposefully wronged. And though I pick my spots more carefully than others, I enjoy casual, spontaneous banter with strangers—in part because I so infrequently interact with them, but also because I can’t really know what’s going on in the immediate world unless I invite the people in it to describe it on their terms, in the moment. What keeps my squirming optimism partly pinned under my implacable cynicism most of the time are aggressive forms of social behavior driven by unexamined or baseless ideas—in particular, idiotic and unaccountable online mobs rallying behind spurious notions of “equity” in the name of personal glorification and at the expense of their peers who stick to the truth.
When I get out among real people, especially for a particular purpose, I almost always recalibrate my views of “people” real and unseen because I look forward to the next such interaction. While I was therefore pleased to have attended a gathering of people in Boulder yesterday afternoon, it was one I wish had never had a rationale for existing in the first place.
On the afternoon of March 22, 2021, a young man walked into a King Soopers supermarket less than two miles from my front door and fatally shot ten people, among them a police officer. Working in the store pharmacy that day was professional runner Maggie Montoya, who was able to leave the area unharmed.
The supermarket remained closed for almost a year as it underwent internal and external remodeling, with the developing facade kept hidden under Tyvek so that its new appearance would be a surprise to the public. A labor strike in January by the Kroger Corporation, which owns the King Soopers chain, delayed the opening scheduled for that month until February 9.
Boulder didn’t quite make it through 2021 without being gored by another catastrophically disruptive event. On the eve of New Year’s Eve, a wildfire originated near Marshall Road, about two and a half miles south of the Table Mesa King Soopers. The spread of the fire throughout the towns Louisville and Superior, which bracket the Denver-Boulder Turnpike, was catalyzed by roaring winds out of the west and northwest; before anyone could blink, close to 1,000 homes and businesses in southern Boulder County had been damaged or destroyed.
No one ever imagines a fire ripping through an entire developed area, do they? It’s as if freedom from fear demands that we believe trees in uninhabited forests are more vulnerable than equally flammable human-built structures, and that the latter are somehow immune to the same uncontrolled spread of flames that occurs up in the dried-out canyons to the immediate west every summer. The nighttime gale-force winds made the glow over Route 36 quietly terrifying even from a perspective safely removed from the blaze.
Lee Troop is known for many things. An Australian who ran in three Olympic marathons and holds a personal best of 2:09:49, he moved with his family to the U.S. and Boulder about 13 years ago. He is the owner of Troop Events Athlete Management, which hosts various races in Boulder when the town allows it. He also coaches a number of top individual locals, including 2020-2021 Olympic marathoner Jake Riley, 31:37 10,000-meter runner Carrie Verdon, and 8:31 steeplechaser David Goodman. T.E.A.M. Boulder as a club features elite, yokel, and youth arms. For purposes of any runner who needs anything, Troop may as well have lived here all his life.
Along with the manager of Runner’s Roost Boulder, Tricia Vieth, Troop also the co-organizer of the Run 4 Stronger Boulder 10K Remembrance Run, which took place yesterday. Rosie has expressed interest throughout the week in checking this event out, as she has been to the running store for fun runs and purchases in the past. So, along with about thirty other humans and one other dog, we found ourselves gathered outside Runner’s Roost, located across a parking lot from the ill-fated King Soopers, on a pleasantly warm, calm, and cloudy Sunday afternoon.
Among the attendees was Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty, who is overseeing the prosecution of Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa’s case. Al-Issa was judged to be mentally incompetent in December. If I had Dougherty’s job, I would spend all of my non-work hours engaged in some combination of physical exercise and blackout drinking. And he must run a lot—he and his son were among the first runners to return to Runner’s Roost sometime around 3:30.
Montoya, meanwhile, was invited to the run, but was busy knocking out a 1:12:45 half-marathon in New York City yesterday. Montoya had made her 42.2-km debut in January with a 2:29:08 for third place at the Houston Marathon.
The route looped through some residential streets before starting an extended climb toward the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Rosie and I run and walk these streets regularly, and would be up on the traof South Boulder more often if I thought the biomatter forming my right knee wouldn’t crumble under too many steep and irregular descents. I had no intention of climbing all the way to NCAR; I knew Rosie would automatically take the last right turn before Table Mesa becomes the dedicated NCAR Road, because she knows where our friends’ houses are and likes to check in with them whether they’re home or not.
We chatted lightly with some of the other runners during the early part of the run, before the climb to around 6,100’ above sea level started stealing everyone’s wind. My sense was that most of the attendees had arrived alone and, while not resistant to boisterous conversation, were there for the same basic reason I was. This was a reward, not a chore. Not one step was a waste of time or anything else. We would all get enough on this day from our own thoughts.
Because we cheated, we were the first runners in the group to make it back to Runner’s Roost. I spent the next forty-five minutes or so chatting with Troop about the basic state of running, not for the first time, and as always left the conversation bearing an odd admixture of optimism and resignation. That for me is a mood. For Troop, as a top-level coach who’s as familiar as anyone can be with the obscure working and motives of the sport’s managerial arm, it is his and his family’s life.
Troop one of those fun figures in running who simultaneously reinforces both how much and how little I know about the sport—not just the competitive side, but the machinations that result in rule-changes and sanctions that to the public appear entirely whimsical. Whenever I get to talking with him, without trying at all, he leads me to consider multiple questions that I hadn’t known even existed when I woke up that morning. Moreover, it’s impossible to not grasp now much this man cares about community and how willing he is to exert himself to extract the best from every communal endeavor in which he becomes a mover.
Whenever I consider how irritating I find the general behavior of people around me, and get the itch to haul my easily relocated life to a different, less crowded location, I soon get a reminder of what I would be missing besides the obvious treat of being able to see some of the people I’m closest to daily: Access to the rare brand of accumulated running and coaching wisdom that Troop and a number of others in the Boulder area offer. (Bobby McGee is another one who humbled me in the same gratifying way when I first talked to him here in Boulder, and that was almost thirteen years ago.)
The Boulder Daily Camera covered the event.
Troop will turn 49 tomorrow, on the first anniversary of the shooting tragedy. He made the video below from the NCAR parking lot, where his wife Freya was staffing a fluid station.
Even on an overcast day, the view from NCAR is hard to top.
Troop credits the Boulder community for its intrinsic generosity of character, but I think he’s missing how forceful a lever he himself is in drawing the best out of the people of this city thanks to his energetic, relentlessly earnest messaging style. Getting the most out of people is a skill one might expect any coach of world-class distance runners to possess, but in my experience, some of the best one-on-one communicators are too painfully introverted to function effectively as public-relations personnel. Lee Troop is an exception, and he is a reminder of the number of special people I wouldn’t have routine access to had I not settled here.
Troop’s consistently connecting Boulderites at large with the city’s sizable and often overly visible running community vouches for what the power of a few people can accomplish. And he’s not alone. I bellyache about the inconsiderate bozos and Nextdoor masking despots, but Boulder always answers the call, especially when the caller is really, really good at messaging.
Take a second. Take ten. “Boulder Strong” may have existed for the past year mostly as yard signs, and like any “never forget” spirit driver, it’s a motto that has inexorably faded into the tumult of advancing history.
But to the many unseen people for whom it did not: Thanks for bringing it home.
(You can make a one-time or recurring donation to the Colorado Healing Fund here.)
(For my money, which like yours drops in value by the hour, Clerks stands as Kevin Smith’s most lasting “Gen X agreeably disrespects everything” cinematic stamp. Dogma makes for a better production with its ensemble cast and cameos, but Clerks did more with less.)