Ideas: Run for Your Life

EARLY IN THE morning of June 6, 2007, a 39-year-old man named Abdullah Dorch walked from Camden, New Jersey, across the Ben Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia.

If anyone had asked the good people of Philadelphia, the city officials and boosters invested in holding together the economic and social fabric of the city, they might have said they’d prefer Abdullah just stay across the bridge. Tall and muscular, with dark eyes, a thin mustache and crooked teeth, Abdullah seemed permanently clutched in an offensive posture; that morning he was headachey and nauseous after a seven-day coke binge. He’d done a year in prison for robbery, 10 years for another robbery, and had no known address. Abdullah appeared, on that hot June day, destined to join the already legion ranks of unemployed, drug-addled black men who roam Philadelphia’s streets and gather on the Parkway, making a mockery of our burgeoning image as the Next Great City.

On June 6, 2007, Philadelphia didn’t need another man like Abdullah. And frankly, Abdullah didn’t need Philadelphia. He was just here to try to catch a ride to New York, where he’d been living before he was arrested for robbing a man on the street and sent to Rikers. After he got out of prison, a friend had suggested he head to Camden to straighten up.

Camden? That morning, after a sleepless, coke-filled night, Abdullah decided to start making his way across the bridge. Halfway across, he stopped. “Jesus God,” he said. “I don’t want to die a failure.”

Abdullah was about to get a strange answer to his prayer.


THAT SAME MORNING, a few blocks away, Anne Mahlum, 27, ran out of her apartment at 12th and Hamilton, out of the area between North Philly and the Vine Street Expressway that realtors had taken to calling the “Loft District,” down 13th Street, through the steamy dumpling smell of Chinatown, past the shiny Convention Center, across vacant Market Street, along the quaint antiques shops on Pine, until she hit the vendors setting up in the Italian Market, and then turned back.

Anne, a Bismarck, North Dakota, native, had been running since she was 16, the year her father, a recovering alcoholic, came home and told her mother that he’d gambled away the family’s savings. You could say she was running away from her problems when she disappeared from her house on long evening runs, but as Anne saw it, she was running toward them. She often cried as she ran, burning off the anger at her mother for making her father leave after he’d made that mistake, the anger at her father for bouncing from one addiction, one obsession, to another. Meanwhile, Anne became obsessed with running. Before she was 30, she decided, she would run a marathon on every continent.

Three college degrees later, Anne was in Philadelphia, having moved here from Washington, D.C., for a position at the Committee of Seventy, the city’s government-watchdog nonprofit. The job was simple — to produce the website and marketing materials — but she threw herself into it, and helped in other ways, like setting up the Dash for Democracy, a 5k run.

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