A Minivan Called Desire: Part 1 - The Invitation

by Jon Waldron

It all started with Pat Moreton, of course, as so many memorable running experiences in the last few years have started with him. Pat moved to California two years ago, and got hooked up with a bunch of Bay-area runners who needed a couple of fast men to fill out their twelve-person team for the 1994 Hood-to-Coast Relay, a race that starts halfway to the summit of 11,000-foot Mount Hood, 50 miles east of Portland, Oregon, and finishes almost 200 miles to the west at the Pacific Ocean. Pat signed on, and sent out an electronic call for another CSU runner to join him. Eventually, John LaChance took up the challenge and the two of them ran last year’s race as ringers for their adopted team. Sue LaChance joined the team to help with the unbelievably complex logistics. Almost as soon as John and Sue returned to Lunenburg and Pat returned to San Francisco, the stories of their heroic exploits began to inflame the desires of their CSU comrades back East. Soon, John and Sue were taking names, and signing up bodies to enlist on a CSU mixed team for the 1995 race.

What was it about this race that exercised such a pull on our individual and collective imaginations? Certainly the race itself was compelling–a stage relay race covering 196 miles across one-third the state of Oregon. Twelve runners would have to run three legs each, thirty-five separate hand-offs, starting at dusk and ending the following day. And why do we actually seek out such challenges as running three 5+ mile races within 13 hours, two of them in darkness? Why, because there’s something indescribably romantic and wonderful about falling asleep out of exhaustion in the middle of a field, waking up cold in the night, shaking off sleep long enough to use the disgusting portable toilets, and climbing stiffly into a packed and slovenly van with your teammates, ready once again to join the glorious battle for bragging rights over another pitiful team stuffed into another van down the road. (Those portable toilets! I could write a book about those things. Race rules were VERY strict about where it was permissible to discharge spent fuel, and because we were all Trying to do the Right Thing, we all spent much more time than we care to remember waiting to use those over-burdened closets from Hell. The lines were always long, and the stench was always a physical obstacle to be overcome. Deciding when to yield to necessity and get in line became a major issue and a source of great anxiety, if not physical pain.) Ok, so maybe it wasn’t so romantic.

Of course, I knew none of this when I signed up. For me, the major attraction of the trip was the excuse it gave me for visiting Portland, my favorite place in the world, where I went to school fifteen years ago. True, I would have little time to visit the places I knew when I lived there, but in fact I would have a chance to finish my first leg almost at the gates of my Alma Mater,Reed College, in Southeast Portland at 1:30 a.m. It sounded too good to be true. Why other people decided to take the trip, I don’t know, but each of us, pursuing our own dreams, booked our flights to the Rose City. Here is the roll-call of the brave and the insane who signed up:

Gregg DelVecchio, Sarah DelVecchio, Holly Fryberger, Annie Komanecky, John LaChance, Sue LaChance, Kim LeSage, Terry McNatt, Sue McNatt, Pat Moreton, Keith Pijanowski, and Jon Waldron. (Tim O’Brien also made the trip out to Oregon and competed with a different team. I’m going to let him write his own story, which, I might mention, included a 200-mile solo bike ride following the race.)

posted by admin in Stories on September 1, 1995

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