On racing trains and other silly things

By Liam Boylan-Pett

Løpe Magazine — November 2024

—

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. I think it was December 2004, but it could have been a month later. 

I could not tell you exactly who was there. The Columbia University track and field team was pretty big, but I would guess there were about six or seven of us. 

I don’t remember if we had gone out drinking in the West Village or had gone to the now-shuttered Peanut Butter & Co. storefront on Sullivan Street for its massive sundae. Probably both, to be honest. 

And I’m not positive whether I told everyone I was going to race the train, or surprised them by bolting once the doors dinged open at 110th Street. 

There are two things, however, when it comes to the story of the time I raced the train from 110th to 116th, that I am sure of.

The first has something to do with shoes. But I’ll get to that.

The second is that at least once every 18 months for the past ten-ish years, someone texts me that someone in Philly or London or, just like me, in New York, has raced a train, too. 

Most recently, it was my good friend Zach Hetrick. He’s a running photographer in New York, and he shared an Instagram post with an influencer racing the subway last week. Before that, it was Rebeka Stowe telling me about another set of train racers. She’s a coach in New York and was a teammate on the New Jersey-New York Track Club back when we both ran really fast (with a recent 2-hour-52-minute marathon in Chicago, Rebeka still runs really fast). In March, she texted me an Instagram link of two runners racing the 1 Train and said, “My guy copied you without my knowing. I’m sad I didn’t get you credit.” 

It’s all good, I messaged back. I was glad there were still fools like me out there, I wrote, having fun “playing” track. 

—

The shoes will matter, that’s a promise. And I’ll get to them. 

But first: Do you ever wonder if you still have the world record or best or whatever we want to call it for a lap around the house or apartment complex you grew up in?

We lived in a few different rental houses in Bath, Michigan, when I was a kid, and, unfortunately, I would guess that I don’t have any of the records for those spots. Not because someone faster moved in after us, though. No, my older brother, Will, probably still has them. At the white house on Drumheller Road, we would sprint from the front porch, running clockwise and avoiding the flowers my dad had planted, approximately 70 meters around. Timing with my dad’s timex he lent us because an egg-timer wasn’t very accurate, my brother would always beat me. Over at the gray house on Peacock there was a huge bush and tree in the back corner plus a decent sized deck, so getting around that house was probably more like 80 meters. And Will beat me there, too. I guess that’s what three years gets you.

It’s sappy, but to this day I am grateful that my brother was fast. He had always been really good at basketball (my cousins and I once saw him drop 29 points in a freshman game back in the late 90s), but I remember him running the 800 when he was in seventh grade. With 200 meters to go, he was pretty even with some guy that everyone kept saying was the best runner in the area. There was an “Oooh!” from the small crowd when Will put his head down and started kicking around the turn. He pulled away and dominated the race. From then on, the Boylan-Petts were runners. We combined for 10 state titles then I followed Will to Columbia, where we ran track and cross-country. 

Over 25 years later, we’re older and slower, but we’re still runners. 

And, I’m proud to say, we’re still fools who “play” track.

—

There’s that line in Shawshank Redemption when the guards don’t notice that an inmate has buffed, shiny shoes on. “I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man’s shoes?” Morgan Freeman’s character narrates. I hate to say it, but I think that I would have spotted Andy Dufresne and foiled his escape.  

Shoes, for some reason, stick out to me. As I keep saying, I know exactly which shoes I was wearing the time I beat the 1-Train from 110th to 116th. 

I know what shoes I was wearing in college my senior year when my roommate and I “played” track. We had a long hallway that led to the living room. We used to set up a shower rod between the two walls that opened up to the living room then throw a bunch of pillows on the floor. From there, we’d high jump into the living room and somehow escaped without any serious injuries. And while I said I remembered what shoes I was wearing, I was lying because I wasn’t wearing any for that activity. Even though we were barefoot, our downstairs neighbors would come knocking on our door soon after they started hearing the syncopated thuds coming from their ceiling. 

I know I was wearing some New Balance super shoes made specifically for the road mile when I was running a mile through my East Lansing neighborhood on a snowy Thanksgiving evening in 2021. I got a demo pair because I wrote some copy for the release of the shoe, and I remember wishing they were even bouncier as I faced a small hill right around the half mile mark. After a Turkey Trot in the morning, eight beers throughout the day, a Detroit Lions loss, and a Thanksgiving dinner, I ran a 5:32 mile. It’s something I do every year now—run a mile after a Turkey Trot, drinks, a meal, and a Lions loss—and even popped a 5:27 last year.

I know that I was in AllBirds when I was challenged to run to the mailbox and back at a winery in Northern Michigan in less than four minutes, and that it only took me 3 minutes, 10 seconds thanks to Strava being able to record the distance for me. 

I know I was in super shoes for the second edition of the Let’s-Race-A-Mile-At-NJNY-Track-Club-2022-Weddings when I beat two-time Olympian Donn Cabral at Colby Alexander’s wedding in Ohio in September after beating him at Travis Mahoney’s wedding in North Carolina in June.

And I know I had on my pink Saucony super shoes at the Boston Marathon with Will this year. We were planning to run together for the first half at around 6:20 pace, but we were a little closer to 6:10. Then, as I wrote about the ensuing awfulness of the last half of the race in my Strava recap, over the next 13 miles we took turns trading the lead. One of us would walk. One of us would run a 6:45 on a downhill. One of us would run an 8:09 on an uphill. After we saw Ashley (my wife and the real hero of the day watching our children) at mile 24, Will took off faster than me and I thought it was over. I slowly made my way to the finish line (Boylston is so effing long) and thought he had gotten me. Turns out he had to stop to walk and I didn’t see him. I won by less than 2 minutes. We don’t need to do that again, that’s for sure—but we were very glad we did. 

And the stupid part is, we probably will do something like that again. Running challenges seem to follow us.

—

Now, finally, to get to those shoes I won’t stop talking about. 

And even though I am sure of what pair of shoes I was wearing the time I raced and beat the 1 Train from 110th to 116th Street, I’m not exactly sure how I got them. 

I thought I knew, but looking up FAFSA rules today, I’m not so sure I am correct. You see, I was a Pell grant recipient. And the way I remember it, I had certain things I could buy with portions of said grant. Some of it was for things like books (not enough, I remember, that’s for sure). But  another thing I could buy was dress clothes—apparently George W. Bush’s Department of Education thought someone who needed a pell grant also needed a fashion update. 

So, in the fall of 2004, I went to some shoe shop on the Upper West Side looking for dress shoes. And after trying on a few pairs and not consulting anyone with any sense of style I picked out a pair of brown, slip-on leather shoes that had a map of the world etched into their black, rubber soles. The Merrell World Passport Loafers would not be described by people with style as dress shoes—George W. would have been disappointed—but they were pretty comfortable. 

And, even whether the government paid for them or not, when I looked down at those brown shoes against the black speckled floor of the subway car on that day in December 2004 or January 2005, I thought to myself, “I’m glad I picked comfy dress shoes.” 

The doors dinged open at 110th Street, and I sprinted out of them and through the station and up the stairs. And while I have told you I’m not the most reliable narrator, I do remember that stretch on the east side of Broadway from 110th to 116th quite well. 

Sprinting, I was past Koronet Pizza quickly—the smell of greasy pepperoni and Jamaican beef patties wafting out through the open doors. I made it up to 111th and the Duane Reade and was feeling good about the way the traffic lights were working in my favor. Tom’s Restaurant, the one that’s the facade of the diner in Seinfeld, went by in a blur at 112th and I had my eye on the New York Public Library a block up as I sprinted as fast as I could, hoping the train wasn’t catching up to me. 

A light turned red as I made it to the record store Kim’s Video and Music and its hot pink signage, but, fortunately for me, no cars were there as I crossed the road and made it onto 114th and the southwest corner of Columbia’s campus. No more streets to cross, I sprinted with all I had, going to the arms and working what I figured was the last few hundred meters. 

I stopped at the gates to Columbia at 116th Street—the trees lining College Walk lit up with holiday lights behind me. I leaned against one of the gates and pretended to be relaxing. The friends I was with ran up and were surprised to see me. I choose to believe it was because they couldn’t believe I beat the train, but there’s a chance it’s because they thought I had simply ditched them and they didn’t even know I was racing the train. 

But, I did “beat” the train that day. (Here I have to add one more detail—even though many people reach out to me about train racing, I wasn’t even the first Columbia track runner to do it. Jonah Rathbun, my roommate who I ended up high jumping with my senior year, did it a few weeks before me.) Both of us beat the train with the made-up rules of needing to be at the exit of the train station before someone else on the train got out of it. 

And those were the rules when a buddy of mine and I started up “Mass Transit Racers” a small running club that raced the trains in the early 2010s and the reason that some people still text me when someone races a train. 

Me? I never raced the train again. When Mass Transit Racers was a thing, I was busy trying to qualify for the Olympic Trials, so I didn’t want to chance injury racing along the streets of New York. 

I don’t have those shoes with the world map on the bottom anymore. They were trashed somewhere along the line, likely after college when the soles were so worn you could barely see the map anymore I finally bought a more real pair of dress shoes. And while I will always remember those shoes and how I raced the train in them, the great thing about doing something like racing a train or your brother over 26.2 miles at the Boston Marathon is that at the end of the day: The shoes don’t really matter. And that’s what’s so great about running for fun. 

—

Today, I still play track. It’s almost Thanksgiving. That means I’ll be running a Turkey trot in the morning, then after beer and food and dinner and maybe even a Lions win (are they actually good now?), I’ll go run a mile as hard as I can. I’ll see if I can find some super shoes for that one—any little bit helps.

It’s a tradition my brother started years ago. And it’s one I hope is still going when my daughters come home for Thanksgiving when they’re older. I hope they’re off at college and embarrassingly tell their friends that their nearly-60-year-old dad puts on his running shorts and a headband after dinner and limps his way to a sub-7-minute mile—at least I hope I’m still hitting close to that in 20 years.

And I also hope that they’ll take up silly challenges as they grow, too. My wife, Ashley, is proving to be a good example. 

We welcomed our second daughter this June to go along with another one nearly three years older. One month after she was born, my wife met her friends at the track and ran a mile in 6 minutes, 18 seconds as the rain poured down and our older one jumped in puddles next to the track. Two months after she was born, Ashley ran 5:57. Then she jumped down to 5:46 and 5:34 for the next two months. 

On our daughter’s 5-month birthday earlier this month, the two of us jogged to the track for a date and I paced her through as she ran 5:27 for the mile, five months postpartum.

I know what shoes she ran in: some Saucony Speeds. 

Who knows if I’ll remember that part years from now? 

But I do believe one thing: I will continue to remember these silly runs almost as much as I remember some of my greatest races. 

From breaking four minutes in the mile for the first time in my white and blue Nike Victory spikes that I still have in a bin in the basement to a race around my dad’s house in no shoes at all, my mind has known to keep some good runs (and shoes) in its rotation of memories.

I may not be able to beat the 1-Train any more, but it always makes me smile when someone else does. 

I’m going to keep playing track, and I hope everyone else that loves running does, too.