Part 1 of 5 in A Love Letter to Fairmount

A few months ago, on a Wednesday at around 7:30 in the morning, I was walking my son to the park behind Eastern State Penitentiary, chatting with two women — Iris, and a friend whose name I have already forgotten. They had a dog with them named Princess. I mentioned a neighbor of mine had a dog by the same name and they said, yah, they knew him. They described him - a crazy in good shape, hypersocial guy. It took me about 10 seconds to realize they were not describing my neighbor (who is awesome too). Instead they were describing Bennett and his dog Princess.

Later that same day, on what the Fairmount Running Club calls Welcome Wednesdays, I ended up jogging next to this guy Bennett. We passed by an early-20s brunette, jogging the other way along Kelly Drive, and she waved and said hello to Bennett. He waved back, said some cheery words to her, but never broke his stride.

This got me thinking. Who is this 50-something guy that everyone in Fairmount seems to know?

I joined on a Welcome Wednesday, the night new runners come out. There was no clipboard, no signup. About thirty people were stretching on the sidewalk in front of the penitentiary wall when I got there. One of them climbed up onto a low ledge, asked who was new, explained the route, and everybody started running. That was it.

There are around forty regulars total, but on any given run it is usually 5 to 20 people. People are always joining — new faces on Welcome Wednesday especially, some stay for years, some try one run and never come back.

We have people of all fitness levels and backgrounds. CEOs and government employees and paramedics and moms. Guys trying to work off the dad bod, people training for a marathon, people who just want some fresh air, etc. The Wednesday slot has a three-mile walking option for people who do not want to run at all.

Bennett is in his fifties and teaches physical education at a public school somewhere in the city. He founded the FRC about twenty years ago. His medium-sized dog Princess runs with him most days — probably forty or fifty miles a week at his rate. He also volunteers as a pacer at races, which apparently comes with free stuff. A few weeks ago he showed up in an ugly pair of tie-dye-looking shoes that I think came from one of them.

Bennett does not have to be at every run for the thing to work. A handful of regulars — his lieutenants — can each climb up on a wall and explain a route. Ken is one of them. About a year after I joined, Ken could not make a Welcome Wednesday and asked me to run the wall for him. I stood up there, said the route, and that was that.

I tried to keep up with Bennett once on a Tuesday morning Zoo run — it is a three-mile loop along the Schuylkill — and within a quarter mile I was done. Bennett, fifteen years older than me, was holding a conversation. He was not breathing hard. He was not running fast.

The rule of the club is no one left behind. If somebody is running slow, somebody else drops back to stay with them. It is the first thing the lieutenant on the wall tells new members. Bennett is one of the fastest in the club, and he is often at the back anyway. I have been the slowest one more than once. It sucks being last at anything, even in a non-competitive running group, and it is nice not to finish alone.

Honestly, I think everyone knows Bennett for two reasons. First, he is always outdoors, walking and running, while many of us (me included) are sitting on our computers, cranking away. Second, he is social. He says hi to everyone, encourages them to run, join the FRC, or check out this or that race. He has been doing that around Fairmount for twenty years.

Fairmount Park running is one of my favorite places in Philadelphia. The trail, the river, the regulars — it’s the loop I keep coming back to.

The club meets four days a week. Monday and Tuesday at 6:30 in the morning, Wednesday evening at 6:30, and Saturday morning for a longer run. Runs are along Fairmount Park and the Schuylkill trail, where you share the path with rowers, geese — who occasionally poop on the running path — and parents with strollers. After most runs there is a group photo at Lloyd Hall. Both Bennett and his de facto lieutenant Ken post to the club’s Instagram, which is filled with pictures of different subsets of about 100 odd people, babies and dogs at different locations after their runs.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people who run along the Schuylkill, especially in the summer and autumn. Some are regulars that you start to recognize (e.g., I sometimes run with a woman named Jesse whose husband, completely unrelatedly, did a free public storytime that my son attended), and others are randoms that you’ll never see again because their schedule changed, or mine did.

Bennett is in most of the photos, but he's never the subject (nor is anyone). He's just another sweaty, panting face in the crowd at Lloyd Hall, surrounded by runners, babies and dogs after a run.