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A Minivan Called Desire: Part 4

by Jon Waldron

A Glitch in Time

Meanwhile, Pat Moreton had found a dreary and depressing vacant lot near the van exchange zone where the team could get an hour of sleep. It had been slow navigating through Portland, and it wouldn’t be as much sleep as they wanted. They were all tired now, because they already had one race under their belts.

At about the time I was finishing, Pat was taking a call on the cellular phone from John. Annie was about to start running, John told Pat, and Pat was figuring how much more time there was for sleep. The spreadsheet said that Annie was due to arrive at about 2:45 a.m.,so there was still plenty of time. Pat lay down in his sleeping bag and kept being bothered because something wasn’t quite right. A few minutes later he realized that the spreadsheet must be wrong and a quick call back to John confirmed the mistake, that, in fact, an extra 30 minutes had been errantly added to Annie’s arrival time, which was a 30 minutes his team did not have. He quickly roused Keith, and told him to get ready to run, because he only had about 10 minutes to warm up. And when Annie arrived, Keith had barely slapped his contacts in his eyes, but as long as he could see, he was ready to run.

Pat Moreton: The Legend Grows

God knows, Pat’s reputation is already safe for posterity, but leaving out his exploits in this race would be to impverish my account of it.

One of the things I love about Pat is that he approaches the task of preparing to race the way MacArthur approached the task of re-taking the Philippines. MacArthur said, “I shall return!” Pat Moreton says, “I shall get fit!” it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when, and when he does get in shape, well, keep the children off the streets, ‘cuz folks’ gon’ git hurt.

After Pat arrived in Portland, it was obvious he was very fit. It wasn’t just that his body was weathered and toughened by adaptation to consecutive 100-mile weeks in the hills of San Francisco and a summer of construction work, it was also the kick-ass attitude that he wore like a leather jacket. He kept jawing with co-captain LaChance about how he wanted tougher stages to run. It was kind of frightening, really, to see the expression in his eyes as he demanded more miles and longer hills. Finally John had to throw him some chunks of raw meat to keep him quiet so the rest of us could sleep. In fact, Pat’s three stages were gnarlacious in the extreme. Leg 1 featured a steady climb of several miles, and Leg 3 crossed a mountain range that appears as a major topographical feature on many world maps. On the first exchange, Pat barreled into the exchange zone so hard and fast that Terry McNatt had a near-death experience trying to take the baton. On his third leg, Pat made up 9 minutes on the mixed team that was our main competition at that point. I heard a rumor that grown men and women were fainting with alarm when Pat pulled into the zone, steam spouting from his nostrils and a smell of charred EVA rising from his smoldering insoles.

After the race, I heard a story that Pat was walking along the beach in Seaside when he passed a group of women from the aforementioned mixed team. One of the women staggered and clutched the arm of her companion, gasping “It’s him!”

Heroes of Van One

I wasn’t there. I didn’t see them run, but I did pore over the spreadsheet and could follow the progress my other Van One comrades as they traversed the countryside at breakneck speed.

First, there was Keith. The brave (or was it naive?) fellow actually volunteered to run Leg1…despite the horror stories from the previous year. I think his motivation must have been to finish first, so he could drink beer first.

There was Holly, who had spent Wednesday and Thursday wind-surfing out at Hood River, and ran the very challenging second leg (1500 foot vertical drop).

Then Sue McNatt who throughout the trip seemed to be everywhere keeping everything under control and on schedule.

Then Kim, who is, in my humble opinion, one of the great relay runners of our age. More than anyone else, she consistently was one-two minutes faster than her predicted time.

And Terry, who is, as we all know, most cheerful when he is participating in some event that leaves a long trail of human wreckage and destruction among the un-gnarly. Pat may be a relentless competitor, but Terry has this habit of running totally outrageous races looking no more perturbed than is he were heading over to the EZ-boy to pop the lid off a homebrew. Terry ran the darkest leg of the race, the 18th, in the middle of the wilderness with no lights and no moon. Many other teams faltered here, their runners going off down dirt roads where they succumbed to hypothermia (it was about 32.1 degrees F) or were eaten by wild animals, but Terry just kind of shrugged and navigated by the belt of Orion or something, coming in right on schedule, stripping to the waist, and asking for a beer.

Heroes of Van Two

While we’re on the subject of my personal heroes…I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when Sue LaChance gets really into a race, her feet don’t actually strike the ground when she runs;instead, the force of her stride causes a local compression of the air beneath those size 6 Nikes and she planes off this atmospheric discontinuity with much the same effect of a bar of soap slipping out of your hands in the shower. Sue had the unenviable role of being the first runner from Van Two to run. This meant that she had to wake up twice in the cold and the dark, warm up while the rest of us were mostly unconscious, and crank. Every time I saw her got hrough this process and get the team jump-started with another monster run, I was more impressed.

And Sarah DelVecchio was another one. She just seemed to get stronger every time she ran, so while the Sarah’s main competition–an air-brushed woman from Nike’s mixed team–looked formidable onFriday night, Sarah positively humbled her Saturday afternoon.

Then there was John, running third, who put together three very strong runs, including a bitchin’ last leg of 7 miles which he ran as though his legs were fresh. John had the longest cumulative running of anyone on the team: 18.4 miles of hills and rough roads. This included 5.4 miles at dawn along a dusty road that went from nowhere to nowhere. The van traffic raised so much dust that many runners wore bandannas across their mouths, or even masks to keep the stuff out of their lungs. Waiting in the early morning haze of wet dust for John to finish was like waiting for the Hound of the Baskervilles to come lurching out of the fog on the great Grimpen Moor.

And Gregg DelVecchio was another one who just kept getting stronger, though he had as little sleep or rest as the rest of us. Gregg’s last leg was about 4 miles and he blasted it, coming in a couple of minutes before we expected him (I was barely ready to take the hand-off). He was also an ideal van-mate, prepared for anything, untroubled by the race chaos all around him, and a man of decisive action with his hand on the wheel of the van. (The DelVechhios, wife and husband, took a day off after the race and then relaxed some more by climbing Mount Rainier.)

Annie was our anchor runner, which is always the toughest leg to run, especially in a race that spans almost 20 hours! Annie overcame stomach trouble after the first stage, and great fatigue on the last to run three solid legs that were right on expected pace. And she didn’t slow down at the end either. The rest of us were waiting there on the beach and we were terribly excited as Annie came into view. I know I was kind of expecting her to coast in, but no…she charged across the sand with conviction, because the race wasn’t over dammit, and it was all anyone of us could do to trail her weakly across the line.