The Man in Lingerie Who Runs Eighteen Miles a Night Along Miami Beach

Few sights surprise people on South Beach, but Elliot Offen manages it nightly. He runs about eighteen miles in ruffled women's lingerie, pantyhose, white makeup, red lipstick and Reeboks, and heads turn as he passes.

"I have seen it all in South Florida, but he is something different," said a Miami Beach police officer who asked not to be named. "He is right up there with Halley's Comet. He's something New Orleans doesn't have."

Offen, 41, is an Orthodox Jew who attends synagogue three times a day and does not run on Friday night or Saturday. A New York native with dark curls down to his shoulders, he worked as a male exotic dancer and later a female impersonator in New York in the late Sixties. He moved to South Florida in 1979 and began running in women's clothes in March 1992. He says he does it to satisfy an urge to "dress as a chick" and to show off his athleticism and "statuesque" body. At five-foot-eleven, he once weighed 265 pounds in his twenties and now weighs 160. "I thrive on public attention, probably because I had no attention throughout my entire childhood," he said.

The routine is also meant as advertising. Offen, who has a second-grade education but reads medical books avidly, wants to start a business as an exercise and nutrition counselor. He says he claims finishes in the top 50 at the 1986 Boston Marathon and 1987 New York Marathon, though officials of both races dispute that. He credits ten years of selling costume jewelry and souvenirs with his father in Times Square for his business sense. "In a schlock operation, the most integral part of any business is advertisement," he said.

His interest in medicine came from his uncle, Murray Offen, now 81 and a veteran of the theater business, whom Offen calls his greatest personal idol. Offen also describes a deep fear of germs inherited from his mother, which he says has kept him from working. He has collected Social Security disability payments for two years.

In the past month he has handed out 300 flyers on Miami Beach offering unlimited phone or in-person instruction in diet and exercise for $95. He promotes a diet of 92 percent unrefined carbohydrates as the path to a "voluptuous, rock-hard body" like his own. He argues that people who watch him run for two hours in 90-degree heat will choose him over Pritikin or Jenny Craig. "So I'm the living proof," he said.

So far the flyers have brought ten to twelve phone calls and no paying clients. Offen blames a lack of motivation among prospects, saying changing their lives will take "a supreme effort."

The attention has not all been welcome. Offen says hecklers have thrown everything from batteries to banana peels at him, and a Miami Beach police officer has warned that running in the Collins Avenue bus lane is dangerous for him and for the buses.

Offen also believes a Metro bus driver is out to harm him. A Miami Beach police supplemental report dated November 20, 1993, records his complaint that a driver tried to strike him with a bus near 54th Street and Collins Avenue. Detective Laurie Wander, who wrote the report, indicated the near collision did not appear deliberate.

Offen further says that on May 2 a driver on a Route T bus, number 8024, told him he wished he had a knife to kill him. He says the driver later tried to close the door on him at 67th Street and Collins Avenue, and that his fitness and the door's rubber lining spared him injury. No charges have been filed, and Wander says the investigation is inactive.