PUBLISHED 05/04/2005
Before the race, in her warmups, Janet Furman Bowman is noticeable from across the parking lot only because she's the tallest woman, and the best dressed. Her pants are black and stretchy and look good on her. The jacket matches. Her blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She's wearing small dangly earrings, red lipstick, and a silver pendant on a slender chain. Her socks are rainbow-striped around the ankles.
Is there anyone here who doesn't know? Janet looks around, surveys the gathering runners, smiles. George has arrived, and Hans, and Dave, who's going to do the 5-K pushing his two-year-old in a stroller. The sky is overcast. Mount Tamalpais, the great woods-covered peak visible from almost anywhere in the eastern half of Marin County, California, looms out beyond the high school driveway where volunteers are collecting entrance fees and marking out the starting line. Men and women trot by, loosening up. Nobody looks at Janet curiously any more—no sliding sideways glances, no startled double takes.
Morning, Janet.
Hey, Janet.
"Here I am," she says.
"Running. With a hundred friends."
She makes it sound like a simple thing.
 |
This is now Janet Furman Bowman on a trail at Mt. Tamalpais, near her home in Marin County, California. |
| Photography by Dan Winters |
At 8:45, 15 minutes before race time, she takes off her warmups. She's wearing black shorts and a red cross-back tank top, the same color as her ponytail holder. Janet is lean and long-limbed, like a pole-vaulter, and as she stands in the pack at the starting line, she tips her body forward slightly and tenses up. A whistle blows. For a minute Janet vanishes within the surge of runners angling for position, and then the pack begins to separate: one lap around the parking lot, they've been instructed, and then out across the grass to the trail outside the high school. By the end of the parking lot lap, Janet is in her stride, body upright, both hands closed into fists. The men are already pulling away—not all the men, but a good-sized swarm of them, Hans and George and the teenager Jason and even Dave, with the stroller.This is the part she hates.She can't help it. She just does. There is so much to be grateful for, after all that has happened; extraordinary graces, she revisits them every day. But when Janet sprints across the finish line?
Pull it in, Janet! Way to go, Janet!—and checks her watch for her time, 23:27, she knows instantly how it compares to her PR for the 5-K: six minutes, 25 seconds slower, or more than two minutes per mile. She used to be able to run 5:30s. Now she can't. She trains, she pushes herself, she uses everything she has; it doesn't matter. On the weekend-morning group runs, when serious Marin runners gather near trailheads to pace each other up the dirt roads that climb Tamalpais, Janet starts with the pack, as she has nearly every Saturday and Sunday for 25 years. "Usually there are a lot of guys," she says. "They start slow. I stay with them for the first mile. Then I start falling away. They're chatting. They don't even notice."
