November 7th, 2022

Why Run the NYC Marathon?

Beer at mile 7 in Brooklyn, after I figured out I probably wasn’t going to win.

OK, I did it again yesterday, running the 26.2 through the streets of NYC.

But the question is why: Why would anyone do that? Hopefully, this brief blog post answers that.

Life is a series of adventures and experiences. You hope for good ones but some will suck.

In the process we do our best, sometimes, to make memories. It was the reason I got sworn in to practice before the United States Supreme Court, despite my expectancy of actually appearing there being someplace barely above nil.

When we are young, we fantasize about experiences to come: Standing on the pitchers mound in the World Series; Soaring toward the hoop in a pro basketball game; And similar for soccer, football, tennis, hockey, the Olympics, and any sport played in an arena with tens of thousands of screaming fans.

Odds are, you will never ever have that fantasy turn into reality. Ever.

Except for one place. There are only a very small handful of major foot races that both attract the best in the word and are also open to the public to compete against them. And the first Sunday in November is the largest one of them all. Not figuratively the biggest, but literally. Same race, same field, same day, same screaming fans.

A million fans — again not figuratively but literally — will line the course and, if you have your name on your shirt, scream for you. Absolute and complete total strangers. Yelling. For you. For you of average athletic ability who trained to run long. You can compete against the best and compare yourself.

Is there any other sport where you can compare yourself to the best in the same event — quantitatively? At the end of the day, you can say you are 50% as good as the best in the world. Or 65%. Or 40%. You know exactly where you stand, for better or worse.

The event is, for those competing for time, a race. But most of the runners, and 100% of the fans, it is the world’s largest piece of urban theatre.

It’s a day when New York City turns in the biggest small town in the world. Strangers chat with strangers. Randos congratulate you on the street afterward. They talk. Not in pixels.

And make no mistake about it, it is an adventure. You don’t really know what will happen. Will it be thrilling or anguishing? Will your mug appear on a bus? Who knows? But if you don’t try to have those experiences, then you certainly never will.

Doing this particular one may be hard, but then, if it was easy everyone would do it.

So go forth and have adventures. If not this, then another. Make it something you can think about in the old folks home years from now. Get out of your comfort zone. Do something new. Because talking about that one viral tweet you had decades ago won’t cut it.

 

August 19th, 2020

An Ultrarunner, An Amputated Leg, and Liability

Heart of the South Road Race

The footrace race ranged 340 miles across the South. Kim McCoy, a 37-year-old nurse in NYC, had already finished 270 miles of it. Then the SUV hit her at an uncontrolled intersection and she lost her leg. Apparently, she’s lucky she didn’t lose more.

This post hits three different spots for me: As distance runner (but not ultra marathons), as a race director who deals with runner safety, and as a personal injury lawyer that needs, when the times comes, to weigh the issue of liability for an event that may have substantial risks.

While that’s a lot to unpack, the gripping story by Matthew Futterman at the New York Times isn’t complex: This is not your local 5K or even your local marathon. The race might take you a week to finish, and that assumes you are in top notch shape. You bring little with you in a small backpack and buy food and water as you travel. You sleep wherever. And you don’t get to see a course map until a few hours before the race starts.

The event is the brainchild of legendary race director Gary (“Lazarus Lake” Cantrell who created the Barkleys Marathons which is so (in)famous among runners there’s even a “delightful documentary” on it, subtitled “the race that eats its young” because so few ever finish the 100+-mile grueling event through unmarked woods. Mostly off-trail. Many years there have been no finishers at all. These were the same woods that Martin Luther King’s killer, James Earl Ray, escaped from to prison to, and he got only 8 miles in 55 hours. The race is designed for failure.

So races that seem impossible, that stretch the bounds of what humans were once thought capable of doing, are his sweet spot.

Thus came the 340-mile race — West Memphis, Ark., to Castle Rock, Ga. — where Kim McCoy was run down by an SUV at that uncontrolled intersection. This isn’t a race with closed roads, or fancy directional markings, or even permits. Here’s the map. Go run. Good luck. See ‘ya.

But when you try to stretch the bounds of human capacity you also run headlong into injury, danger and potential death. Exhaustion makes everything more difficult and dangerous. It’s easy to miss a simple rock or root on a trail, or a car on a road, when bleary-eyed, dazed and discombobulated.

This problem came into full appreciation when McCoy tried with another runner to cross Highway 72 near Huntsville, because that is the way the route went.

They made it to the median, then thought they saw an opening. Halfway across, Grinovich saw a flash of light and pulled back. McCoy kept going. He heard a crack and was sure she was dead. Then he ran to her and heard a moan. Somehow, after being sent airborne down the highway, she had hit feet first and rolled, rather than crashing on her head. As she tumbled, her backpack had cushioned the impact.

Tucked into that NYT story of McCoy’s race across the South comes this speculation about liability for injury — after all, race director’s know that the participants may not be thinking straight and more in danger:

Who bears responsibility for McCoy’s accident is a question lawyers and insurance companies may have to decide.

She has not filed a lawsuit, but has retained a lawyer, even though she signed a waiver releasing Cantrell from liability before the race. Waivers don’t allow race organizers to act with negligence, the definition of which can be subjective.

Now I’m not going to opine on Alabama law — or even which state’s law applies since McCoy and Cantrell live in different states and the incident happened in a third. Or did it? The drawing of the map, after all, may well be the “incident” itself.

I’m sticking here with general principles (as they would apply in New York). Your mileage, as the old saying goes, may vary.

The doctrine of assumption of risk, which I have written about often, generally precludes suit against an event organizer when the risks are known and appreciated. Sometimes referred to as the “baseball rule” for spectators that are injured by foul balls or flying pieces of broken bat, it holds that you have assumed the risks inherent in the activity.

Perhaps, if the race demanded that participants do something illegal — like demanding that runners cross an interstate highway, one might be able to raise the argument that assumption of risk doesn’t apply. Race participants don’t, after all, get a map well in advance of the race and have an ability to check out the details. And even in this kind of race, a reasonable participant wouldn’t expect something illegal.

But that isn’t likely given the photo of the crossing in the Times and the comment by Cantrell that pedestrians were permitted. If pedestrians were legal here, it would be unlikely to to be a successful suit.

The key for any sporting event director is to actually show, as best you can, what the anticipated risks are so that they are appreciated. This not only helps to immunize from suit, but more importantly, actually informs people of the types of dangers they might expect so that rookies don’t errantly step into an event they are unprepared for.

I do this with the disclaimer for my own race. (I never understood those disclaimers that use unreadable ALL CAPS legal gibberish to help a participant appreciate risks.)

The story of McCoy’s incident and the loss of her leg is awful. But it isn’t likely that a lawsuit would be successful against the organizer of the race.

 

November 19th, 2019

Mary Cain, Alberto Salazar and Coaching Malpractice

Ahh, I get to do a post on both running and the law! My sweet spot. Let’s have at it then, with the scandal roiling the running world and see how it fits into a legal framework.

The Players

Alberto Salazar was the world’s greatest marathon runner, winning New York three straight times from 1980-1982, and winning Boston in 1982 in an epic Duel in the Sun.

As a bona fide legend, he moved on to coaching, leading up to being the head coach of the vaunted Nike Oregon Project, training some of the best runners in the world.

This was not just any coaching facility, of course. Nike poured money into equipment and studies well beyond the means of any amateur, and most professionals, including the removal of oxygen from a room to simulate high altitude conditions, which can benefit runners. The Wikipedia synopsis:

In addition to the simulated altitude training, special software was used to monitor electrodes attached to the athletes, determining what condition they were in and how far or fast they could train. They used underwater and low-gravity treadmills. They also had a collaboration with Colorado Altitude Training (CAT), a company specializing in hypoxic athletic training, for their training equipment.

Mary Cain was one of his athletes. Born in 1996, well after Salazar had raced to greatness, she was arguably the best high school track star in the country. And a straight-A student.

She signed with Nike in 2013 and went off to Oregon to train with Salazar as a college freshman.

But she didn’t see the scandal coming. Nobody ever does.

The Problem

In a video op-ed (embedded below) in the New York Times last week (I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike) Cain tells a harrowing story of her time spent with Nike and Salazar. She was directed to become thinner and thinner and thinner, and ultimately developed an eating disorder.

Much of her training was, apparently, the same as the boys. And therein lies a problem. Because boys and girls are physiologically different.

When girls get pushed into a boy’s training program they run the risk of their bodies breaking down. Because it has a negative effect on estrogen levels, which has its repercussions in bone density loss, among other problems. Bones become more susceptible to breaking. That is what happened to Cain due to Salazar constantly badgering her and trying to humiliate her into losing weight.

After months of dieting and frustration, Cain found herself choosing between training with the best team in the world, or potentially developing osteoporosis or even infertility. She lost her period for three years and broke five bones. She went from being a once-in-a-generation Olympic hopeful to having suicidal thoughts.

Nike and Salazar held themselves out as experts and specialists. Yet what they were doing was injuring the young women who had placed their trust in them. And not just Cain.

Kara Goucher, an Olympic distance runner who trained with the same program under Salazar until 2011, said she experienced a similar environment, with teammates weighed in front of one another.

Goucher went on to explain that, “When you’re training in a program like this, you’re constantly reminded how lucky you are to be there, how anyone would want to be there, and it’s this weird feeling of, ‘Well, then, I can’t leave it. Who am I without it?’ When someone proposes something you don’t want to do, whether it’s weight loss or drugs, you wonder, ‘Is this what it takes? Maybe it is, and I don’t want to have regrets.’ Your careers are so short. You are desperate. You want to capitalize on your career, but you’re not sure at what cost.”

How may others will come forward in this athletic version of #MeToo remains to be seen.

Cain’s seven-minute video op-ed describes the abusive system she was under. At 16 she got the call from Salazar and in college went off to train with him, in order “to become the best female athlete ever.” Instead, she says, she was physically and emotionally abused in a system endorsed by Nike.

The top running program in the country had no female coaches, no sports psychologists, no nutritionists. He wanted to give her birth control pills and diuretics to lose weight (the latter of which is not allowed in track and field).

With the eating disorder and injuries she became suicidal, starting cutting herself. She told Salazar. Who told her to go to bed.

Cain is now advocating for women coaches who appreciate the physiological differences between men and women and know they have to be trained differently. People who know how to build strong women’s bodies not just to race tomorrow, but for the long haul.

So. What would a lawsuit look like if Cain sued Nike for negligence?

The Legal Framework

I probably wouldn’t have done the analysis below if I hadn’t read a post from my buddy Scott Greenfield, wherein he was dismissive of Cain’s complaint. He wrote that athletes like Cain make their own decisions to try to be the fastest and to win, and that comes with the trade-offs of loss and injury. They need, therefore, to take personal responsibility for their choices and the risks they undertook to push themselves to get there. Who would deny them the agency to make their own choices? (See: Run for your Life)

You don’t have to suffer this abuse, but then, when you’re a world-class athlete and the tiniest edge distinguishes the podium from the pack, you want to do whatever it takes to win. You’ve learned to lose, and it sucked.

In one of the comments about whether the coach should know better, he writes that:

this is about world-class athletes who push themselves to be the best ever. Complaining about the trade-off afterward is facile. And much as parents and athletes trust their coach, it’s not to “know better,” but to win. If their paramount concern was their well-being, they would have stayed home.

This rang a bell in my head and lead me to think of the “What if” potential for a Cain suit. Greenfield doesn’t use the words “assumption of risk” (as he isn’t using the post to undertake a legal analysis) but that is nevertheless a theme: You made a decision to compete in x, and x has its risks, and you got hurt. Don’t blame others.

Assumption of risk is an old concept here in New York (and elsewhere). It applies to the bike racer who hits a pothole in the street, the ice skater who falls and breaks a wrist, and the fan in the stands injured by a foul ball.

Fundamentally, primary assumption of risk will supersede an act of negligence by the creator or supervisor of an athletic event. So even if there’s negligence, the suit will get tossed if the participant assumes the foreseeable risks.

It was best summarized by Justice Benjamin Cardozo in Murphy v. Steeplechase Amusement in 1929 when someone flopped off a moving belt ride that stops and starts, known as The Flopper. Cardoza wrote:

A fall was foreseen as one of the risks of the adventure. There would have been no point to the whole thing, no adventure about it, if the risk had not been there. The very name above the gate, the Flopper, was warning to the timid….

…One who takes part in such a sport accepts the dangers that inhere in it so far as they are obvious and necessary, just as a fencer accepts the risk of a thrust by his antagonist or a spectator at a ball game the chance of contact with the ball 

(And a little side note as Justice Cardozo continues on — I wish judges still wrote like this)

The antics of the clown are not the paces of the cloistered cleric. The rough and boisterous joke, the horseplay of the crowd, evokes its own guffaws, but they are not the pleasures of tranquility. The plaintiff was not seeking a retreat for meditation. Visitors were tumbling about the belt to the merriment of onlookers when he made his choice to join them. He took the chance of a like fate, with whatever damage to his body might ensue from such a fall. The timorous may stay at home.

That last phrase at the end, “The timorous may stay at home,” has been oft-quoted. Indeed, I use it myself in a Disclaimer for the trail race that I put on each year, trying to use wording that evokes the spirit (if not the exquisite style) of Cardozo’s assumption of risk summary.

Given that I’m a runner, and a race director, and a lawyer that does personal injury law, this stuff forms a trifecta of interest to me and (to the extent you are likewise interested) you can see some of the ways this subject has previously come up in my little corner of cyberspace with snowboardingsoftball practicehorseback riding, auto racingwater slides and lacrosse.

But is that what’s going on here with Cain and Salazar? Was she hurt in competition, or even during training? She wasn’t injured, for example, by falling when she crashed into another runner fiercely powering through a turn. Most every case I’ve ever read on the primary assumption of risk doctrine deals with a specific incident, and whether the thing that caused the injury was an anticipated or appreciated risk.

Mary Cain doesn’t deal with a particular incident or an appreciated risk. She went for expert advice, as many might do for a doctor, lawyer or car mechanic. We seek out people with specialized skills and talents because we don’t have them ourselves. If they sound like they know what they’re doing, or have been highly recommended by others, we hire them.

Nike and Salazar were supposed to be the best. Top of the heap. Cain reasonably hired them and followed their advice. Salazar, after all, had been at this for decades.

But their advice was not just bad, it was apparently dangerous, and dangerous in unanticipated ways. Cain faced medical issues that would not have been apparent to her. And Salazar and Nike provided no help when faced with them.

I would not discuss this in the language of assumption of risk, but rather, of coaching malpractice. It’s negligence, or even recklessness.

Would such a case survive a motion to dismiss?

The legal analysis, if it were ever to come to that, would pit these two essential concepts against each other: Was she a negligence victim, with Coach Salazar directing her to perilous conduct (unknown to her) that no reasonable coach would direct? And even if she was, would assumption of risk apply, with Cain accepting known dangers inherent in athletic competition, resulting in such a suit being tossed?

To me that answer is clear: Creating an eating disorder that would have long-term harmful effects on the athlete was not part of any known training program. It was not an anticipated hazard she could evaluate and appreciate before signing on with Nike. And any reasonable coach would have, had the issue arisen, immediately brought in psychologists, physicians or nutritionists as needed if one of their charges was having that problem.

Salazar, ultimately was suspended for four years for drug doping. The Nike program has been disbanded (for now). Nike’s CEO stepped down. And Cain went public with the abuse she underwent.

The extent to which the athletes under Salazar/Nike’s charge knew they were being doped by Salazar and Nike remains unknown.

Some may believe that the doping and the starving are two different things. But I’m not so sure, as both entail athletes who have placed their faith in the expert, and been told by them to eat (or not eat) certain things without knowing, understanding, or appreciating that it was dangerous conduct as the risks were not explained.

It’s simplistic, I believe, to think that a teenage athlete would have more knowledge than a legendary runner and coach with decades of experience. He was hired, and trusted, due to those decades of experience, his advice and skillset. And he betrayed the trust.

Her video op-ed is here:

 

October 20th, 2017

Lawyers (and other advocates) Need A Hobby

The Paine to Pain race logo

All too often in life, those who are professional advocates get so wrapped up in their little piece of the world that they fail to see the bigger picture. This happens with lawyers, of course, but likewise with any political advocacy group you find.

Go to Twitter, for example, and you’ll see no shortage of people obsessed about one thing, and one thing only (and that one thing is, all too often, politics).

But if you want to be effective, you have to actually leave that advocacy behind and engage your heart and mind in a completely unrelated hobby. Only then can you step outside of your work and even attempt to view it objectively.

If you are advocating, then you need that objectivity, because the people you’re trying to convince are not those that already drank your flavor of Kool Aide. The advocacy is geared toward are those that don’t have an opinion, or are open to being persuaded because they are not all-consumed with confirmation bias.

For me, as regular readers know, that  hobby is putting on the Paine to Pain half marathon trail race each year that now attracts about 700 athletes from 15 states. We get about 200 volunteers to help. This is not a small undertaking on my part.

But, believe it or not, I think this makes me a better lawyer. While it is time spent away from writing briefs and “being productive” in the office, it helps to give me perspective.

Having raced over these trails, and seen so many others do it including some with disabilities, I’m more rounded as a person. Not because it’s running, but because it is something other than lawyering.

It also makes me a better project manager, which is a large part of being a trial lawyer if you are the one with the burden of proof. If you don’t line all your ducks up in a row and prepare, prepare, prepare, then you won’t succeed, regardless of whether the “event” is a trial or a conference you are directing.

It doesn’t really matter what your passion is outside of your area of advocacy. It could be sports, music or your local church/synagogue/mosque.  If it happened to also be a community based hobby, as mine is, you will also get the incidental benefit of becoming more well known in your community, which might bring with it unexpected opportunities.

If your advocacy consumes you and you can’t look at the rest of the world objectively, you aren’t going to be a very good advocate. Engaging those outside hobbies are critical to perspective and effective advocacy. And might have additional professional benefits.

 

October 30th, 2015

NYC Marathon and Law (Sometimes)

ASICS ad, 2012 NYC Marathon, photo by my son, then age 10, at end of 2010 marathon

I noted the other day that I had, over the last 9 years, hijacked my blog to talk baseball, even managing to toss some law into the mix. It was my way of celebrating that my Mets were in the World Series.

And today I do the same thing with running because, as it happens, the NYC Marathon is this Sunday, and over the years I’ve also done a slew of running posts, often mixed with law.

This Sunday, if the stars are all properly aligned, I will run the marathon by day in a Mets shirt and then climb to the top of Citi Field at night for game 5 of the World Series. So if you see some guy like that running while waving an orange rally towel, it’s just me trying to have a helluva-sports-kinda-day.

Isn’t that your image of what a lawyer should look like?

Post have ranged from a marathon length Blawg Review back in 2007, to discussions of the assumption of risk doctrine, to the stoopid legalese we often see in waivers, to the circumstances of how I found my face on the side of a bus.

And sometimes, there is no legal angle at all. I just wrote something because I enjoyed writing it. Whether you enjoy reading it is an altogether different factor.

Without further ado, the rest of a round-up of running related posts that have appeared here, some of which actually deal with law:

 

Boston Marathon (Drinking Beer, Kissing Wellesley Women and Abstract Journeys)

Turkewitz in the News…

Trial Tactics and Race Planning

The Long Blue Line (26.2 Miles of It)

New York City Marathon (Some thoughts and photos)–Updated for Zoe Koplowitz

The Boston Marathon (Highway to Hell)

Did Paul Ryan Lie? (About His Marathon Time?) -updated

Legal Implications for Cancelling NYC Marathon? (Updated)

Twelve Miles To Newtown

Boston Marathon Bombing (And the Lives We Lead)

What Does A Smile Mean? (Updated x2)

Running, Lawyering and The Great Stage

Passover and the Boston Marathon Bombing

Boston Marathon, 2015 Edition (Updated!)