How do you shelter in place when you have no shelter?  

With nowhere else to turn, a dear friend of ours and pillar of the running community has been sleeping on the New York City subway. With a neurological disease and rapidly declining mental health, a man who has given so much to bring out the best in others is falling through the cracks.

Bob Donegan, who recently turned 60, has devoted much of his life to coaching runners. It is because of him that we – Rita and Annette, started to believe we had the potential to in fact improve as runners. For years, he engineered detailed instructions for Annette’s every run, taking into account travels, sleep, stress levels, life, and training plans for the teams she trained with – I credit Bob with every single personal best I ran in the years he was coaching me, including qualifying for Boston, twice. The same attention to detail and genuine caring went into Rita’s training (who progressed from an amateur occasional runner to being within the top 10 of her age/gender group for some of the NYC races in which she participated, earning a cash prize once!) and that of countless others. 

Bob and Annette discussing adjustments to training  in 2018

Rita finishing a race that Bob helped her prepare for in 2019

Now he needs us to return his kindness.

Every night that he remains slouched against the glass of the subway, Bob becomes more and more at risk. While our healthcare system heaves under the strain of the Coronavirus, services for the most vulnerable are stretched thinner than ever. 

Bob has never complained. Even in the last couple of years, when a neurological disease made it hard for him to run, he would rarely say much about his own condition. So it’s only very recently that we learned just how bad things are: Bob lost his apartment after renting from a dubious person, he lost his primary doctor after a mandated change to his insurance plan – losing access to any continuous or standard of care and medications, sending him in a downward spiral as his mental health was already declining. Despite it all he was able to keep on coaching his long-standing trainees (like us) as efficiently, reliably and caringly as ever – but in his own personal life, he hasn’t been able to pull himself up on his own. He was not able to look for additional trainees to make ends meet or to take care of his own basic needs. 

That’s why we need your help. We have supported Bob as best we can, getting him interim accommodation, connecting him with medical services, and he will soon be getting some urgently needed medical support. But at this moment, a lot of services are closed, or have had to reduce their capacity.

So we’re turning to you – our friends, family, fellow runners, and anyone who might relate to this struggle – to help ensure that our friend gets the safe shelter and mental health services he deserves.

We are looking to get Bob into a sustainable housing situation after he receives the medical support he needs. We are trying to raise six months worth of rent (about $6,000) but any amount will go towards sustaining his housing, hopefully also for a longer duration, helping him back on his own feet.

Bob is wonderfully funny. Here, we randomly found camels on 46th Avenue.

Bob is an incredibly gifted coach. He is acutely sensitive to the needs and personality of each of his trainees, adjusting the training plan to fit everyone individually, to be dynamic to reflect weekly changes in mood and stamina, being able to sustain motivation in others to do very hard work for many years. This is no small feat. We are now poised to help him enhance his own motivation and ability to get through this. Please help us help Bob. 

Bob discussing training plans with one of his trainees.  Bob is pretty camera shy so we don't have a lot of  photos of him.

We will ensure to keep you updated on his situation and the progress made possible because of your generosity.

Thank you so much! Rita & Annette