The author (right) with her friend and running mate Holly Wheeler in January 2022. Photo courtesy of Casey Patrick
I called my boyfriend and told him what happened. I didn’t tell him personally because we lived 1,000 miles apart and were rarely in the same room. The incident involved a man riding his bike with his pants pulled down around his ***, yelling at me, “Do you want some of this?” It was quite a feat of balance, I thought in the split of a second before I realized that it was a threat, stalking me in the black morning when I was trying to go for a run. I called the police, who took a report. My boyfriend said he was sorry it happened, and we both laughed at my description of the flasher’s pale butt shining under the streetlight.
By then we were almost a year into our relationship, which began shortly after I ended my marriage of 19 years, when my post-divorce emotions were at their worst. When we met, I immediately opened up to him about who I was and what I wanted from life and a relationship. I probably should have sworn off men for a while so I could reflect on why my marriage failed, but instead, I was pushing forward.
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I refused to let a creepy stranger dictate when I could leave my house, so I kept running in the dark, but now it was different. Every time I shifted my gaze to avoid being swayed, the headlight cast a hard shadow that looked like the man, ready to cast. It was everywhere.
When my boyfriend came to visit the following weekend, we ran together, and I felt safe again. He was tall and fit and never worried about being caught. I hated that I felt safer with him just because he was a man while the source of my fear was also a man, how men had power over my sense of security.
After my boyfriend returned home, the creeper reappeared, this time riding his bike past my house in broad daylight and then turning to look directly into my kitchen window. I called the police, and they sent an officer to search the area.
That was the first time I got a good look at him: hooded eyes, black hair, skin pulled tight around his jaw. He looked anxious, which was scary, like he wasn’t in control of his own actions. If you saw a mug shot of him, you could tell he looked like a serial killer.
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The detective assigned to the case told me the man’s name. He had a history of exposing himself to women and lived a few blocks away on my own street, but no one had actually caught him so they couldn’t arrest him. A woman a few blocks up had nicknamed it the penis pedal.
“This is horrible,” my boyfriend said on the phone later. “I wish I could be there for you.”
“It’s good,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” But I was kidding myself.
As the sun went down, I double checked every window and door lock. Armed with pepper spray, I searched under the beds and inside the bath for the man’s lean and able body. I put a garbage can by the kitchen door to listen when he inevitably came in to rape and kill me. I put the number of the police department on speed dial and tried to sleep.
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Two days later, the flasher rolled by me while I was walking with a friend. I contacted the police, as I was told to do.
The detective placed a deer cam that worked in the dark on my front porch post. He said that the police thought that the creeper might have a particular interest in me, which sounds like a strange compliment.
My best friend suggested I borrow her dog for protection, but I declined. Another asked if I had a restraining order against the man, but that seemed extreme. My boyfriend suggested I take a Peloton, the assumption was that I could lock myself in my house and ride a fake bike going nowhere while the creeper rode his bike freely outside wherever he wanted. I refused.
The detective was right. The flasher became less active when the weather became cold. Photo courtesy of Casey Patrick
I told the detective that I could run early in the morning as a disappearance so that they could actually catch the man, but the police did not want to put a civilian in harm’s way. They borrowed the idea and sent female officers as bait, but the man did not take it.
I started running with my phone and pepper spray all the time. I got faster that season. Running out of fear is motivating.
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Two days after installing the camera, the detective stopped. On the tiny screen, he showed me footage from the previous morning of a fuzzy gray ghost on a bike spinning in and out of frame. Two minutes later, there I was in my tank top, running in the same direction as the man. He had been waiting for me, and I had no idea he was there. Then the detective told me that, years before, the man had assaulted a female runner in our city park, and dragged her and stripped her to the ground.
I called my boyfriend.
“This is awful. Are you running tomorrow morning?” he asked.
“No. I think not.”
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“Okay. But if you do, text me when you leave and when you come back, please,” he said.
“Why?”
“So I know you’re safe.”
“What are you going to do if I don’t text?” I didn’t give him time to answer. “I appreciate it, but it’s not really useful if I tell you when I leave and when I get back. It’s the intermediary that’s the problem.”
“I know. I just feel helpless here.” I flinched at the notion that he was helpless, marked through the ways that he was not – that he was a chief man among them.
I was always so proud of how scary I was, but the creeper had broken me. I was upset with him and I was upset with the police and I was upset with how women are always expected to accommodate men in the world. I set up Peloton in my guest room.
In September 2025, the author ran a half marathon with her son and her husband, Chris. Courtesy of Casey Patrick
When the weather changed, the police predicted that the creeper would be less active to avoid literally freezing his *** off. The neighborhood test group reported fewer sightings. I still had some run-ins. He caught me in the afternoon when I was jogging, parked his bike on the street to watch me rake leaves, and then we watched as my children and I unloaded the groceries from our car.
My boyfriend and I had been dating for about two years when the creeper stuff stopped forever, so I sold the Peloton on Facebook.
“That was sudden,” my boyfriend said when I told him.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It makes me feel like you can wake up one morning and get rid of me,” he said.
“I would never do that. At least not on Facebook,” I said.
I thought he was overreacting, but his reaction also made me believe that he was helplessly in love with me and that I was in control of the fate of our relationship. He knew that I wanted to be the one to pull the strings of my life, to be able to walk freely around the world without arming myself with pepper spray or thinking that someone else might hurt me. He knew these things because I had told him so. For the first time in my life, I felt emotionally secure with a partner.
Six months later, we made plans to live a few miles apart. I will never have to feel unsafe again. But as he was giving me details about the packing of the boxes and the moving of the trucks, and I was planning for him to be with me for the holidays, I discovered that he was married. He had lied to me – and to his wife – for three years. As real as that sense of both emotional and physical security with him had felt, it was a mirage.
A few weeks after I learned the truth about my boyfriend, I saw my flasher neighbor walking by my house hand in hand with a woman’s face, their eyes slanted towards each other. The detective had told me that the man stayed out of trouble when he had a girlfriend. It made him calmer just as it had made me feel safer.
I wish my boyfriend was more like the creeper in some ways. Maybe if he acted like a terrible person, I could have protected myself, locked my heart so he couldn’t enter. But my boyfriend was an exquisite liar.
He was much worse than the flasher on the bike. At least that guy was honest about his creepiness. He did not present himself as harmless and mentally sound. He was reckless and often only partially dressed – red flag! My boyfriend, on the other hand, was generous and kind. He acted like he respected me and always had my best interests at heart.
Friends assumed I would have difficulty trusting other people after my ordeal, but it didn’t work out that way. My horrible boyfriend is the person who helped me realize how important emotional security is. They made me want to be able to share myself with another person.
Anyway, when I fell in love with a new guy who seemed kind and unmarried, I felt like I could open up to him about anything, but I knew better than to trust my own judgment. I asked him to produce a copy of his divorce decree before I let things go too far. I ended up marrying the guy, and sometimes we go running in the dark.
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