Close Calls, Well Wishes, and People Accounted for in Running Community After Collapse

It felt like an odd thing to do at the time -- evidence perhaps that this "reporter thing" I do still isn't first nature -- but yesterday afternoon I sent an e-mail off to a few dozen running and track community contacts to find out if everyone they knew was all right after the Interstate 35W bridge collapse.

At the time, with numbers of missing estimated between 20 and 70 people, I thought it wasn't unlikely that someone from the broad community of running and track and field in the state might have either been on the bridge, known someone on the bridge, or witnessed the tragic event.

I was especially worried for the folks at the University of Minnesota, close-by the scene of the wreckage, or runners driving to that evening's Como Relays.

Thankfully, from what I've been told so far, except for Marcelo Ordaz-Cruz's frightening ordeal, the disaster did not exact a toll from our little sub-culture. Matt Bingle, Steve Plasencia, and Gary Wilson all report that everyone of their charges are accounted for at the U.

My e-mail query did return a few stories of close-calls and what-might-have-beens, however.

USATF Minnesota president Rick Recker drove under the bridge on the way to Como Park only ten minutes before the collapse.

"I was thinking of leaving a little later, having just realized that the race started at 6:45, not the 6:30 start that I had planned on," he told me. "What would have happened then?"

Recker faces regular reminders of that question: he can see the bridge wreckage from his home.

MDRA's Heidi Keller-Miler had planned to run the Como Relays too -- and projects that she would have been on the bridge right around 6:00 p.m. -- but decided at the last minute not to go.

News of the bridge collapse did prompt running community folks from across the nation to reach out to friends and colleagues in Minnesota.

When Runner's World reporter Jim Ferstle of St. Paul came inside his house on Wednesday evening after watering the garden he saw on caller ID that colleague Peter Gamabaccini had called.

"I called back and he asked how I was doing," Ferstle recounted. "I said fine. He then asked how Dennis [Barker] was or if I'd heard anything about the other Team USA Minnesota folks. I said they were all fine as far as I knew."

"He then realized," Ferstle continued, "that I didn't know what had happened. He said: 'You don't know do you?'"

We all probably have a story or two like that, I bet.

The folks at Twin Cities Marathon told me that 1984 Olympic marathon gold medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson sent them a note expressing her thoughts for everyone in the Twin Cities running community.

It's a good thing to know we're not alone.

Here's hoping the forthcoming news is the best possible for everyone involved in the tragic event.

Here's hoping, too, that every running breath we take is more valuable to us in light what others less fortunate have experienced.