DON’T BLAME ME

A case currently ricocheting around the “halls of justice” in California may well have a profoundly devastating effect on the sports of road racing and trail racing—as well as any other form of amateur racing.

The case is Saffro v. Elite Racing, Inc., and it involves a Chicago medical doctor who ran in and finished the inaugural Suzuki Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego in June 1998. On his flight back to Chicago, he allegedly suffered a seizure and was hospitalized with severe hyponatremia (commonly referred to as “water intoxication,” the ingestion of so much water that it washes the sodium out of the blood and causes a chemical imbalance in the body). Dr. Saffro spent four days on a ventilator and his attorneys claim he suffered lasting neurological damage that “has left him unable to practice medicine.”

The suit claims that his condition was caused by lack of sufficient fluids on the course of the marathon, which caused dehydration, and that the race organizer, Elite Racing, Inc., is responsible. Saffro finished the marathon in 4:17:32, which put him in the top third of the finishing field; it was reported to be his third marathon.

The case was originally dismissed by a Superior Court judge who said that hyponatremia was an inherent risk of marathons; the judge cited a 1992 California Supreme Court ruling in Knight v. Jewett that bars suits over sports injuries that result from ordinary risks inherent in the sport.

Saffro’s lawyers appealed to a state appellate court, which decided to see it differently, claiming that runners are entitled to expect that the organizer will not increase the ordinary risks.

As of this writing (late July), a decision has not been made as to whether the case will be heard; that decision is being reviewed by the Supreme Court of the State of California.

Several race committees, led by attorney Tony Rossmann of the Western States Endurance Run Foundation, have filed letters with the Supreme Court urging the court to grant review of the appeal. The races include the Napa Valley Marathon, the New York City Marathon, and Running USA.

What does all of this mean for you?

It means that if the case goes forward and Elite Racing, Inc., is found liable for Dr. Saffro’s well-being in a competitive event, all racing as we know it will cease, in large part because the committees that put them on (usually volunteers) will be unable to secure liability insurance for their events and will be unwilling (or unable financially) to stick their necks out only to have them chopped off by the first participant who claims he should have been taken better care of.

In essence, it is one more stumble in America’s lurching toward a “blame somebody else for your own stupidity” stance. Personal responsibility, on which the country was founded, has eroded to the point that it becomes noteworthy—even newsworthy—when someone steps forward and says, “Hey, it was my fault. I screwed up. I’m responsible. I made a mistake.”

Were there problems with the inaugural Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon? Yes, there were. The race started about 45 minutes late because police held up the start while illegally parked vehicles along the course were removed. It was an unusually warm day in San Diego for June. And some aid stations either ran out of water or had long lines of runners waiting to get to the water.

Compared with races many of us ran in the 1970s, it doesn’t sound particularly odious. Some marathons then had little if any water. Some racers felt it was unmanly to take water during a marathon. International rules made racers wait for water in marathons until they had run at least 5K. I’ve personally run ultras on hot days where we dipped our water bottles into horse troughs we found along the way, letting the water filter through the spaces between our fingers in an attempt to keep the horsehairs out of our bottles.

But I digress, as I do too often these days, to the Good Old (Semi-Difficult) Days.

There are several major flaws in Dr. Saffro’s case, not the least of which is that California decisions already on the books set out the risks one undertakes in participating in an endurance event.

1. He bypassed water at the aid station at 4.1 miles because he didn’t want to wait with other runners to get his drink.

2. Being in the first third of the field, he found water available at most of the aid stations.

3. At any point along the course, he could have stepped off the course and thereby eliminated any subsequent risk, but he did not. (I doubt that I would be squealing on most of our readers if I said that most of us have, at one time or another, assessed the situation and stepped off the course during a race for one reason or another. I believe it’s common sense exerted as the result of free will.)

4. Some 16,000 other runners completed the race without mishap.

5. Dr. Saffro’s problems didn’t begin until hours after the race, while he was on his way home to Chicago.

6. The legal claim is that he suffered from dehydration and hyponatremia, yet the two are mutually exclusive. Dehydration is a shortage of fluid; hyponatremia is an excess of fluid. Is it possible that after the race, feeling dehydrated, he drank and drank and drank until the overload of water began to leach sodium out of his body? Sure it is, especially if his body was not trained to retain sodium in hot weather. But how is that the race’s fault? (I would be hard pressed to think of anyone among the hundreds of people who have raced on either the 135-mile portal or 150-mile summit course at Death Valley in July who have suffered from hyponatremia.)

Why is this case scary? If the courts decide that the case can be heard before a judge and jury—the outcome at the hands of a judge who has no appreciation of the inherent risks in endurance sports and jury members who likely have never encountered an endurance race and who are prejudiced against people who take what they see as foolish chances—anything can happen.

California judges and juries do not have a reputation as the most informed or commonsensical in the republic.

In a current case in California, a snowboarder paralyzed herself doing a jump at Bear Valley Ski Area. She sued, the jury awarded her millions, and the judge decided that wasn’t enough millions, so he added more—completely oblivious to the fact that the ski facility had not forced her to do an ill-advised jump that went bad.

We’ve turned into a nation of blame junkies, always looking for someone else to take responsibility for our bad choices in life.

For a long time, endurance running seemed to be a safe-and-sane haven from the insanity and the spinelessness of our modern weenie society. It was where we could place ourselves against a course and a clock, and come what may, where the result of our race was the direct effect of what we had put into our training. Where we were more likely to hear postrace rationalizations like, “Ya know, I never learn. I knew not to go out too fast, but I just can’t seem to keep it under control. Boy, did I die in the second half. One of these days I’m gonna learn how to do this right.”

Lately we’re starting to see a backlash against race directors who state plainly and upfront in their race applications, “Whiners and weenies need not apply.” People who aren’t fit to enter the race and take on the course are now offended that someone implies that, because they aren’t entering, they’re either a whiner or a weenie, as though everybody is supposed to care.

People seem to be “offended” by just about everything and anything these days. A few weeks ago a woman in the local newspaper’s letter column wrote that she was “offended” by California’s “Adopt a Highway” program where people can “adopt” a two-mile stretch of highway, which they and their friends clean up four times a year. The woman wasn’t “offended” about the highway cleanup program; no, she was “offended” by the use of the word “adopt” being applied to anything other than adopting a child. Naturally, she was an adoptive parent. Fortunately, within the next several days, other adoptive parents wrote in and in a nice way suggested she get a life. I hope she didn’t read the other article in the same issue where the local school district had “adopted” a specific social studies textbook.

It likely was not a textbook that prominently featured the Founding Fathers, who set up the country as a place where everyone had the right to fail as a step on the way to potential success and where they put everything they owned (and they had the most of anyone in the 13 colonies to lose during that period) on the line, with the expectation that if they failed they would be hanged in the process.

So, hey! Let’s not blame them, huh?

They set it up so that we all have the freedom to make asses of ourselves if we so wish. If we take ourselves out of the gene pool in a spectacular fashion, Wendy Northcutt has a Web site at www.darwinawards.com where we can become immortalized. The Founding Fathers would have appreciated the entertainment and educational value of that.

What they would have thought of Richard Saffro, I’ll let you decide. I doubt that he would have been hanging with his Revolutionary War buds at Valley Forge. —Rich Benyo