Chapter 1: Impossibility, excerpted from In Search of Al Howie by Jared Beasley. Al Howie was one of the world’s first ultrarunners, taking on insane thousand-mile runs in split shorts and tank tops, fueled by beer and his own personal demons.
Buckets of rain had drummed and drenched the runners for 15 hours and counting. Tents flapped like carnival banners. White tarps sagged under the weight of standing water—Queens itself seemed to sigh. From the dark, slipping through puddles the size of rowboats, came a wisp of a man—sinew and bone—a figure roped with mileage.
Under the yellow glare of the old park streetlamps, his hair, sun-bleached and ragged, was brushed up like a lion’s mane. It danced wildly in the breeze. His beard, thick and wiry, stuck out beneath hawk-boned cheeks—red with touches of fool’s gold blond. Over that, his eyes were a calm blue, half-glazed, half-defiant.
As he passed, his battered sneakers, Ron Hill 207s, tapped the concrete as light as raindrops—“ballet slippers,” the runners called them. Rumored to weigh a mere 2.07 ounces—his shoes were as thin as a golf glove. Al Howie hoped to run 1,300 miles in them.
Two days before, he and nine others had stood under the spindly banner in Flushing Meadows, Queens—September 18, 1989—noon, with the mercury soaring over ninety. A course map pinned to the timing tent resembled a melted slice of New York pizza. It laid out the one-mile loop around the Unisphere, the 700,000-pound metal globe left over from the 1964 World’s Fair. To finish, they’d have to circle it 1,300 times in 18 days—three marathons a day—or be dropped. Sleep as little as possible, ignore the pain, and keep your mind far from the soul-sucking boredom. Run the length of I-95 from New York to Miami—without ever leaving New York City. Since its inception, no one had ever completed it.
The Impossibility Race
“It’s physically impossible,” declared Frank Shorter, the great American gold medal marathoner. That became its nickname—the Impossibility Race—the mad dream of Indian spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy. For over a decade Chinmoy had designed endurance challenges to break the body to empower the spirit—run and become. His followers numbered in the thousands. That spring he’d spoken at the United Nations. Beneath his sleepy eyelids, his pupils fluttered left and right in meditative bliss. His 1,300-mile race was the longest certified footrace in the world.
At the start of this, the third running, he beamed with pride. “Brave runners,” he whispered in a thick Bengali accent. “My heart is all gratitude to you. The English dictionary houses the word ‘impossibility,’ but your life history book does not include the word ‘impossibility.’”
Howie had started in a flash with sunglasses and bravado—seven-minute miles one after another, then down in the sixes. His bare, skinny legs turned over like a metronome, cutting through the haze wafting off the concrete. The other runners held back, rationing strength. Not Al. He moved like Secretariat breaking from the gate. Only after 30 miles did he throttle back to a 10:30-per-mile pace. Night fell, and the lights of the tennis courts came to life. When the sun rose again, he’d stacked up 113 miles—no sleep. Then came the rain.
Howie pushed on, clocking 81 miles on day two. He ran soft, light as air. Trishul Cherns remembered the calm: “You’d think no one was behind you—and then suddenly, there was Al.” On the third day, the skies cleared, and Howie made it to 267 miles. He ended the first week with 573 miles, still not even halfway, and the forecast had turned dire. Hugo, a Category 4 hurricane, had made landfall in South Carolina and turned north.
It hit on day eight like a hammer. Sixty mile-per-hour winds whipped down the tree-lined corridors of Corona Park. Most runners opted for sleep or huddled under the Kanza shelters. A brave few climbed out of makeshift tents to run another day to be greeted by a cold September rain that stung like wasps. When it finally passed off to the west, a frigid arctic air swept over the runners, freezing their sore, numbed limbs stiff.
A Loop of Soup
The loop turned to soup, littered with shoes, soaked shirts, and bits of tarp flapping in the wind gusts. The Greek god Zeus, cast-iron and towering over the path, seemed to glare down, lightning bolt in hand, daring the last mortals to quit. Most did. But Howie didn’t. He charged over the course, polka-dotted with water holes the size of rowboats. He averaged over 73 miles a day for 11 days straight—more than three full marathons every day. “Nothing can stop him,” said Stefan Schlett, over 30 miles behind.
On October 5, Al Howie crossed the tape for the 1,300th time. A simple timer perched on two folding chairs read 16:25:00—a four taped beside the one, so the clock read 416 hours. He’d run for 17 days, 8 hours, and 25 minutes, sleeping as little as three hours a night. A dozen or so fellow runners and volunteers stood wrapped in rain jackets, clapping in the mist. He wore his sweat-darkened Victoria Runners’ Association tee, thrift-store plain, under a battered red warm-up jacket with the sleeves shoved up. The same Ron Hill flats—soles flapping, toes peeking through. In one hand, a large Canadian flag. In the other, the Scottish Lion Rampant snapping in the wind as his hair blew sideways, matted and gold.
Still, he didn’t stop. He turned around and did one more loop in the opposite direction, passing under the Day-Glo banner and vanishing back into the night.
The Tartan Spartan
What was known of Howie was rumor imported from Canadian running magazines: Dubbed the Tartan Spartan, he was a journey runner, who ran city to city all over the country, living off of fish ’n chips and beer. No plans, no schedules. Al held nothing back. “No p’int in savin’ y’rself,” he explained to a writer afterward, in his thick brogue. “Y’r goin t’ get tired anyhow.”
“I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” he added, quoting an old rallying cry for peasant independence. Few would have imagined those words were more personal than philosophical—that he’d literally been living on the run—dodging Interpol for years before fleeing to Canada. He’d ship his clothes from town to town by bus, pick them up, change, and run on. And his real name wasn’t Al.
Explore In Search of Al Howie
Al Howie was one of the world’s first ultrarunners, taking on insane thousand-mile runs in split shorts and tank tops, fueled by beer and his own personal demons.
Then he disappeared amidst a swirl of kidnapping allegations and an Interpol investigation.
In Search of Al Howie is the critically acclaimed story of a man who ran forever and how author Jared Beasley found him—uncovering the origins of ultramarathon and exploring the larger-than-life personalities who carry on the legacy.