Friday Fun: Champions of Everything, Everywhere II

[This story is dedicated to my friend Coach Dean Hebert who inspires so many runners in the Phoenix area and has been my personal mentor and inspiration. The Lake Tahoe Relay will be held this year on June 9th 2007, but I will be running the Rock N Roll Marathon the weekend before and unable to compete with him.]

It’s time for a good story.

A couple of years ago, I was part of a relay team at the Lake Tahoe Relays. My very good friend and mentor Coach Dean Hebert put together two teams to run in the round-the-lake race. Our teams were set up to be competitive with one another, meaning that there were both faster and slower people on both teams.

Coach Dean wanted to make things interesting, so he put something on the line. A trophy and bragging rights to become “Champion of Everything, Everywhere II.” This might at first seem like a trumped up designation, but we all bought into it. Not only were we attempting to win this Championship - it wasn’t even the first time he’d done it. This was apparently the second iteration of the challenge, as denoted by the “II”, since Dean and his brother had conducted the first championship years earlier as kids.

Nothing like a good challenge to get a bunch of runners all hopped up and ready to beat each other into the ground.

In this particular event, each person only runs one leg. It’s not like some of these other races where you alternate and everyone runs multiple times. Tahoe is about leaving it all on the table, because there’s no tomorrow. There’s just the thought of being crowned “Champion of Everything, Everywhere II” - and having bragging rights over all of your running friends.

My leg assignment was the anchor leg, meaning I would have to run the last section of the race. And also meaning that if the race was close it would come down to me and the other runner. The distance of the leg was 10 ½ miles, but really it could have been 50 yards the way this story unfolds. The terrain was unbelievably hilly, the day was hot, and the race was being run in the thin air of high altitude.

The day started to unfold predictably with our teams changing leads back and forth, gunning for each other, mooning each other, doing the typical stuff that runners do. At some point, one of the runners on the opposing team had a melt down of some kind and a substitution had to take place. The whole thing sounded sketchy to us, never knowing whether Dean may have planned this whole thing. We heard that the person was named Paula and we became convinced that Dean was about to substitute Paula Radcliffe into the mix to keep us on our toes. Somehow though our team pulled well ahead after the swap. Apparently it wasn’t Paula Radcliffe from London, but rather some other Paula that wasn’t that fast.

Anyway, as the race started to draw to its close, we weren’t quite sure how far we were ahead of the other team. Lack of intelligence (data, I mean) is a killer in a race, because it’s hard to know how fast you’ll have to run to stay ahead. But again, this race could have been 50 yards if it were a mile.

The afternoon was baking and I stood at the top of a very, very large hill waiting for our runners to come into the exchange zone. The relay was running counter-clockwise around the lake and there was a Harley-Davidson rally going the opposite direction. I stood watching the Harleys roar by as I waited in the 80 degree afternoon sun.

As with all relays, one minute you’re standing talking to someone, telling them your best Porta-potty story, and the next minute, you’re flying down the road at far too fast a pace with a baton in your hand. That’s exactly what happened here.

My leg started by going down an enormous hill toward the lake and then it promptly went back up a hill just as large. I don’t know exactly how much elevation we’re talking about here, but for the sake of the story, let’s just say it was at least 5,000 feet (it was more like 1,000, or 500, but it felt like 5,000). By the time I had over-run the downhill and struggled up the uphill, I was about 2 miles into the run and was already completely gassing it. I was sucking the oxygen-light air, like a smoker trying to get the last puff out of the last cigarette in the world. I was starting to cough and wheeze like a smoker too.

After sputtering and choking along for awhile, I finally got back into some kind rhythm. Sure it was more waltz than tango, but I was moving the right direction. I knew this was going to be about survival more than anything else. At this point, I had no idea how far the other team was behind me, but I knew that I was already hurtin’.

The miles passed and as I came to about one mile to go, I heard Coach Dean’s brother yelling at me from the side of the road. “You can catch that guy ahead of you,” he encouraged, “he’s dyin’!”

‘That makes two of us,’ I thought to myself. Frankly, I had nothing left. I was just trying to keep the motor going. My bottles were empty. My tank was dry. My mouth felt like I had licked a bag of cotton-balls.

Then I saw “him.”

It had been a quick look of desperation over my shoulder to see if the other team was coming up on me. But I saw something else instead. “He” was a guy behind me about ½ mile down the road. He wasn’t just back there either, he was flying toward me like a Labrador Retriever going after a Frisbee.

I took another look, and I kid you not, he was already 100 yards closer than the last time I had looked. This time I made a more careful inspection of him. He was wiry thin, wearing black shorts and no shirt, and running in a wild, crazed, tumultuous manner. He looked like some crazy combination of the Tasmanian Devil and the Man in Black.

I was now maybe ½ mile from the finish. I looked over my shoulder one more time; I could see that if I didn’t pick up the pace, he was going to catch me at the line.

Our team motto was “nobody, but nobody, beats us in the last mile.” And certainly, I was not going to let some crazed black-shorted, shirtless, Tasmanian Devil beat me, whomever he was.

I pulled my hydration belt off, throwing it into the grass, like a steam-ship dumping its cargo in order to keep afloat in a storm. Sure, if I was comparing myself to a steam-ship at this point, my engine would be out of gas and I would have hole in my hull. You get the picture: I had nothin’ left.

But somewhere, deep down inside, I was finding just a bit of momentum to keep going.

And then I saw it. On the ground, ¼ mile from the finish, was a bright, shiny, copper penny. I admit, I’m incredibly superstitious. Under any other circumstances, I would have stopped and picked it up. I briefly had the thought that if I didn’t pick it up, I was going to be cursed with bad luck and fall on my head. But if I did stop, there was no way I’d beat the Man in Black, who was still roaring up from behind me. I made a promise right then. I looked up at the sky, briefly closed my eyes, and promised God that I would come back and pick up the penny later, if he just gave me the good luck right then and there that I needed.

I opened my eyes, after my brief conversation with the almighty, and I had reached the end of the road. Here the course turned sharply left into a parking lot, for a final 50 yard sprint to the finish line. There were crowds of thousands (or maybe at least two dozen) lining both sides of the street and all along the finishing lane in the parking lot. Right as I hit the corner, the Man in Black was upon me. Like a big thrashing salmon, he was out of control and barreling right up next to me.

Time stopped.

I planted my left foot firmly on the ground and made the turn toward the line. I rotated. I set my body straight toward the finish, and then I hit the gas. I exploded forward with the force of a missile.

As time resumed, the Man in Black had taken the corner wide. He was out of position and tilting badly to his outside. He recovered and hit the gas, but it was too late. There are very few people that could have out sprinted me from that position. We were like dragsters shooting toward the line, complete with fire coming out of rears. The crowd was going insane.

The two of us, me and the Tasmanian Devil, barreled across the line. I couldn’t stop. I ran out of room at the end of the parking lot and had to jump over some bushes at the end.

When I wound myself down, I turned and saw the Man in Black on all fours, throwing up. He was surrounded by my teammates, who were jumping up and down, yelling “you made him puke! Dude you made him puke!!!!”

Yes, I had conquered the Man in Black.

I left my team behind and jogged back out onto the course, this time, to pick up that magic penny just as I had promised to do. I still have that penny today.

The moral of this story is a subtle one. Never let a crazy, shirtless, man in black, from another relay team, whom you’re really not competing against, pass you in the last mile of race, because even if there is absolutely nothing at stake, you will have one hell of a story to tell if you beat him.

I don’t know what happened to the Tasmanian Devil guy. He lives on in my memories and in the photo shown here on my website. What I do know is that I beat some guy by a mere 1/100th of a second and kept our team from moving from 72 to 73 place.

Ah the sweet taste of victory.

Oh, and we were crowned Champions of Everything Everywhere II and I have the trophy to prove it.

Coach Joe

Running Wild with Coach Joe – a blog focused on marathon racing, training and motivation. Bookmark us at http://coachjoeenglish.wordpress.com or use your favorite RSS feed reader to get the latest news and articles. Running Wild is also now available on Yahoo! 360 and My Space.