Local Man Runs Mainly to Prepare for Possibility That He May Someday Be Released on Remote Private Island and Hunted for Sport
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A local man runs at least three times a week not for the usual mental and physical health benefits or to prepare for a race, Dumb Runner has learned, but to maximize his chances of survival should he ever wind up on an isolated island and tracked like an animal by a mad trophy hunter eager to bag nature’s most elusive prey.
Sanger Rainsford, 42, said he devours wilderness survival handbooks and studies hand-to-hand combat for the same reason—even if, he acknowledges, the chances he’ll ever need them are remote.
“Is it likely I’ll find myself trapped on a remote, heavily forested island someday?” Rainsford said. “Not really.”
“And if I am ever in that situation, is it likely that island will be home to a self-exiled psychopath who’s been waiting years for the chance to hunt and kill a human? Also no.”
“But,” he added, “if I am, you can bet your ass I’ll be ready.”
Rainsford, who described his training as “mostly five- or six-mile runs, with hill repeats once a week or so and a long run of 10-15 miles most weekends,” said he’s never competed in a road race of any kind and has no interest in ever doing so.
“It just seems kind of trivial, you know?” he said. “Compared with, say, a battle of wits and endurance where winning means freedom and losing means having your head stuffed and mounted on the wall of some lunatic’s wood-paneled study.”
Asked how me imagines he might find himself in such a situation, Rainsford paused.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’m drugged and kidnapped, and I wake up on this weird island. Maybe it’s a plane crash that kills every other passenger. Maybe I get shipwrecked.”
How he lands on the island, he stressed, won’t matter.
“What matters is that I’m there, one minute having a lavish dinner in a formal dining room in some weird guy’s sprawling estate, and the next, given a 30-minute head start before he sounds a horn and sets out to hunt me down.”
“I mean, if that happened to you, would you be ready?” he said. “Because I will.”
