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A Minivan Called Desire: Part 3 - The Start

by Jon Waldron

About 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon, August 25th, the Van One people packed themselves into Van One and the Van Two people packed themselves into Van Two, and both vans left the Komanecky’s and headed out to the Mountain. Traffic was heavy, and it took us a good 45 minutes before we intersected the race route about 35 miles West of the start. It was very strange to drive by runners whose teams had started hours before, who were by now 30 miles ahead of us, when we still had two hours to go before our start. Stranger still to realize that we would catch many of them before the next afternoon.

The race started in waves of about 20 teams every 15 minutes. The first waves had started early Friday afternoon. Our predicted time for the race had qualified us to start with the elite wave at 7:30 p.m. This was a gas, because the elite wave included the Nike and Adidas teams, as well as other fast mixed and masters teams. Before getting us underway, the race master of ceremonies was really getting into hyping the Nike-Adidas Tong War. And no wonder, for both teams were stacked with national and international class runners. Lining up for Nike was the diminutive and explosive Eddie Hellebuyck, who seemed aerodynamically designed to make the most of the first leg, a 5.4-mile free fall with a vertical drop of 2000 feet. Undaunted by the course or the competition, our man Keith Pijanowski lined up alongside the legends showing nothing but disdain for their anorectic statures and inversely heavy competitive resumes.

The elite runners, the crowd, the megaphone voice intoning the honors of the runners on the line, it was all wonderful and exciting. And as the true master of the goings-on, there stood behind us in the late afternoon sun the high peak of the mountain itself. And then a moment later the starter sent the runners on their way. Hellebuyck popped from the start like a champagne cork, while Keith decided to survey the race from rear and rather deliberately loped downhill.

(Hellebuyck would never slow down, and no one would challenge him for supremacy. He finished the leg in about 22 minutes to average just over 4:00 per mile, about two minutes ahead of his nearest rival. His run broke open the race at the very beginning, and Nike never looked back, going on to defeat Adidas by almost an hour.)

While waiting to see Keith at the first exchange zone, we realized that in all the excitement on the mountain, no one had remembered to start a watch. We compensated by starting a watch exactly one hour after the start, but since we had to record all our times, it was an annoyance for next 19 hours.

Leap-Frogging

For those of us in Van Two, that was about the last we saw of our Van One teammates actually doing any running. The logistics of racing and sleeping meant that we had to keep leap-frogging them. Here’s how it worked: first, each van kept track of its own six runners, dropping off the runner to go next, picking up the runner who had just finished, and getting people warmed up and cooled down in an efficient way. This was tricky at the beginning, but became routine after a while. Second, while the crew of one Van was running, the crew of the other tried to drive ahead to the next Van exchange (six legs later) so that its inhabitants could catch a few hours of sleep. So after watching Keith hand off to Holly, Van Two drove off to the start of Leg 7 to catch a few hours sleep in a big field next to a Safeway supermarket. It was a beautiful night, and I think most of us did manage to sleep a little bit. To keep us in touch with Van One, John curled up in his sleeping bag with the cellular phone.

Falling asleep was a challenge. To begin with, we were too excited to sleep. Furthermore, it was only 9 p.m. on Friday night. And finally, there were the sounds of the race, audible all around us, and especially the loud voices of the “spotters” whose job it was to call out the numbers of approaching runners so that those waiting for the hand-off would be alert enough to receive it. And it was dark, so the spotters really were performing a valuable service. However, we grew to hate them and their endless intoning of three-digit numbers loudly into the night. “2…8…3!!” (and this would be relayed by repetition down the line all the way to the exchange zone)”2…8…3!” “2…8…3!” And then another, “5…3…7!!”"5…3…7!” “5…3…7!” And so on, and so on. At 9 p.m. it was barely tolerable. Later, at 3 a.m. in the middle of the wilderness, when sleep wouldn’t come, we came to feel (perhaps unfairly) that these spotters had been assigned to us as personal torturers.

But we finally did fall asleep, and then a short hour later, John was making the rounds rousing us from sleeping bags. I felt sorry for Sue LaChance who not only had to wake up, but had to warm up as well and get ready to race. On the other hand, it was terribly exciting after so much time in anticipation to finally have a chance to run.

Terry was the sixth runner from Van One, so he handed off to Sue. Our rotation was Sue, Sarah, John, Gregg, myself, and Annie. That meant that when Sue received the baton, I still had about two hours before the start of my leg. Because the rules of the race require that every runner carry a flashlight while running, it was a beautiful sight to drive down the back roads of Sue’s course watching the tiny lights bobbing up and down like lanterns on ships at sea. Because of the vastly staggered start times for all the teams, the congestion was manageable and relatively constant. We had few problems with the exchange zones and before too long I was warming up for my first leg, a 6.4 mile stage that entered Portland and wound through the suburban neighborhoods of my College days. It was a little before 1 a.m. Saturday morning.

My run went pretty well. I passed about a dozen people, and ran down a fairly fast guy from one of Nike’s farm teams in the last half mile. Perhaps I overdid it, as my next two races were pretty lame. I handed off to Annie, at about 1:30 a.m. and began cooling down. The night was fragrant and calm. I felt in a very contented mood.

(While I was lost in my reverie, Annie had the unenviable task of running through a busy night-time neighborhood at just about the time when the bars were closing and their patrons were emerging out into the streets.)