Run with the Raven – Add it to your Miami bucket list

In May I wanted to do something cheap (in this case, free), yet meaningful for my birthday.  Minus those seven months in LA where I body guarded Webster (inside joke), May also marked ten years in South Florida. What better way than to check off an item from my Miami bucket list.  I decided to go on a run with the Raven. Robert "Raven" Kraft has been running eight miles on south beach for the last 34 years -EVERY DAY. A friend of mine pointed him out to me one sunny South beach weekend. "There’s Raven, he’s about to hit a 100,000 [miles]," my friend informed me.  I had seen him before running on the beach with some people in tow and realized he was some kind of regular on the beach.  Anyone that’s not a tourist has seen him running on the beach. I assumed the guy ran a lot but I had no idea. Well I had heard that ESPN was featuring him on a show celebrating his significant mile marker (no pun) and had hoped to join one of his runs before he reached ultra celebrity status.  I wasn’t able to beat the show but was able to get the standard Raven experience nonetheless.  Turns out Raven and the group  of 12-15 runners that joined him that day were all extremely down to earth. Raven is just a guy that is committed to his thing and seems to welcome the company he gets on any given day. Everyone that runs with him for a full run gets a nickname.  Admittedly half my motivation for making this run was to get my name. Pondering the thought of law school and other grand things at the time, I welcomed a moniker with the hopes of some needed insight like those passed out to some Native Americans.  Shuttle Runner.  Not exactly mind blowing considering one of my jobs at the time was driving a shuttle van.  Plus I didn’t exactly see myself doing that work forever either. In the end, it fit however, as it seems to represent my overall running style. The run itself isn’t hard at all. It is not a competitive thing in the least.  Everyone engages in welcome conversation with anyone that joins and the Raven purposefully takes his time .  As he likes to say, has has do to it all over again tomorrow.  Anyone that can run three miles briskly can do this lengthier run. After a good distance where I felt it would no longer be rude to do so, I took off and sprinted the last mile and a quarter to really get my heart pumping like I crave – maybe solidifying my new nickname.  After the run the Raven goes for a quarter mile swim. Of course, everyone is welcome to join that too.  That day the waves were rolling pretty hard (for SoBe standards). It was the perfect adventurous way to end the day. I was pretty happy with my gift to myself. www.ravenrun.net