The author (right) with her friend and running partner Holly Wheeler in January 2022. Photo Courtesy Of Casey Patrick
I called my boyfriend and told him what had happened. I didn’t tell him in person because we lived 1,000 miles apart and were rarely in the same room. The incident had involved a man riding his bike with his pants pulled down around his ***, hissing at me, “You want some of this?” It was quite a feat of balance, I thought in the split second before I realized he was a threat, stalking me in the black morning when I was just trying to go for a run. I called the police, who took down a report. My boyfriend said he was sorry it had happened, and we both laughed at my description of the flasher’s pale butt glowing under the streetlight.
We were nearly a year into our relationship by then, which began not long after I ended my 19-year marriage, when my post-divorce emotions were at their rawest. 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 tripping, my headlamp cast a hard shadow that looked like the man, ready to pounce. He 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 stalked. 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 on-off power over my sense of security.
After my boyfriend flew back home, the creeper reemerged, this time riding his bike past my house in broad daylight and then U-turning to look directly into my kitchen window. I called the police, and they dispatched an officer to search the area.
That was the first time I got a good look at him: hooded eyes, black hair, skin drawn tight around his jaw. He looked anxious, which was scary, like he wasn’t in control of his own actions. If you saw his mug shot, you might say he looked like a serial killer.
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 caught him in the act so they couldn’t arrest him. A woman a few blocks over had nicknamed him the penis pedaler.
“That’s awful,” my boyfriend said on the phone later. “I wish I could be there for you.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” But I was kidding myself.
As soon as the sun went down, I double-checked every window and door lock. Armed with pepper spray, I looked under beds and inside the bathtub for the man’s lanky, capable body. I shoved a garbage can against the kitchen door so I would hear when he inevitably broke in to rape and kill me. I put the police department’s number on speed dial and tried to sleep.
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Two days later, the flasher rolled up beside me while I walked with a friend. I contacted the police, as I was told to do.
The detective put a motion-triggered deer cam that worked in the dark on my front porch column. He said the police thought the creeper might have a particular interest in me, which sounded like a weird 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 get a Peloton, the assumption being 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 turned cold. Photo Courtesy Of Casey Patrick
I told the detective I could run in the early morning as a decoy so they could catch the man in the act, but the police didn’t want to put a civilian in harm’s way. They borrowed the idea and sent out female officers as bait, but the man didn’t take it.
I started running with my phone and pepper spray at all times. I got faster that season. Running out of fear is motivating.
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Two days after he installed the camera, the detective stopped by. On the tiny screen, he showed me footage from the previous morning of a fuzzy gray ghost on a bike rolling in and out of the 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’d 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, dragging and pinning her to the ground.
I called my boyfriend.
“That’s awful. Are you running tomorrow morning?” he asked.
“No. I guess not.”
“Good. But if you do, text me when you leave and when you get 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 in-between that’s the issue.”
“I know. Just feeling helpless over here.” I flinched at the notion that he was helpless, ticking through the ways he wasn’t — being a man chief among them.
I’d always been so proud of how fearless I was, but the creeper had broken me. I was pissed off at him and pissed off at the police and pissed off at how women are always expected to accommodate men in the world. I set up a 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 turned, the police predicted that the creeper would be less active to avoid literally freezing his *** off. The neighborhood text group reported fewer sightings. I still had some run-ins. He intersected me one afternoon when I was running, parked his bike down the street to watch me rake leaves, and then watched as my kids and I unloaded groceries from our car.
My boyfriend and I had been dating for about two years when the creeper stuff stopped for good, 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 might wake up one morning and just 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 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 pulling the strings of my life, to be able to move freely about the world without arming myself with pepper spray or thinking someone else could hurt me. He knew these things because I’d 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 from each other. I would never have to feel unsafe again. But just as he was feeding me details about packing boxes and moving trucks, and I was planning on him being with me for the holidays, I discovered that he was married. He had lied to me — and his wife — for three years. However real 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 past my house hand-in-hand with a wisp of a woman, their foreheads tilted toward each other. The detective had told me the man stayed out of trouble when he had a girlfriend. She made him calmer like my boyfriend had made me feel safer.
I wish my boyfriend had been more like the creeper in some ways. Maybe if he acted like a terrible person, I could have protected myself, locking up my heart so he couldn’t get in. 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 didn’t present himself as harmless and mentally sound. He was reckless and often only partially clothed — 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 trouble trusting other people after my ordeal, but it didn’t work out that way. My awful boyfriend is the person who helped me realize how important emotional security is. He made me want to be able to share myself with another person.
Still, when I started falling for 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 for runs in the dark.
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