The name of this race I went to at the last minute turned out to be almost as long as the ordeal my training partner Chad Newton and I underwent just to get to Pigeon Forge, Tenn. and back.

We had originally planned to run the Bele Chere 5K in nearby Asheville until discovering on Thursday that that race no longer offered prize money (not much of a consideration for someone of my current racing fitness but a real issue for Mr. Newton). Scanning the Web, we discovered that the 5K in Pigeon Forge included over ten grand in prize money, so Chad called his agent extraordinaire, who managed to secure him a free hotel room and comp entry with the start less than 40 hours away. I, ever the willing coattail surfer, decided to go along.

Pigeon Forge is about 110 miles away, most of it on interstate or other major highways. About halfway to our destination, just as we approached the Tennessee state line, traffic on I-40 ground to a halt. We covered about five miles in the next ninety minutes (later we learned, not to our surprise, that there had been a major accident up ahead). We managed to reach an exit ramp and scooted about ten miles up a dirt road before getting back on the highway. We eventually reached Pigeon Forge after spending four hours on the road. That we had guffawed at Mapquest's estimate that the 110-mile trip would take over three hours was bad enough, but the real joke still lay almost twenty-four hours in the future.

We had arrived too late to grab our numbers that afternoon, so we headed straight for the hotel (which was only 600 meters from the starting line; maybe our luck was changing). The clerk was a forty-something heavyset woman who immediately pegged us as runners and asked if we were entered in the following morning's 5K. When we told her we were indeed, she - assuming we were not only runners, but new runners - informed us she'd run the race herself the year before and launched into a detailed strategy session about how to best tackle a three-point-one-mile road race. She claimed she'd been leading the women's race (which in 2001 had been won in 16:35) when she tripped over a pylon and was forced to drop out. She also admitted to back problems and allowed that she'd been taking chondroitin sulfate for a while but had discontinued the stuff because it "made her fart somethin' awful" (I caught this clearly although much of what she said was difficult to grok on account of the particularly thick accents common to folks in this part of Tennessee; it might be said that they speak "Pigeon English"). Damn sulfates.

I did an easy four-miler (during which I became soaked with sweat at eight-minute pace) before retiring early after watching "Escape From Alcatraz." When we checked the Weather Channel the next morning, we discovered that the predicted high for the day was 90 degrees and that the humidity in nearby Knoxville stood at 90% at six in the goddamned morning. Of course, there's no sense bitching about conditions in this part of the country in late July because they aren't apt to change much. Viva la South!

The prize money had drawn a phalanx of resident Africans from the Chapel Hill and Kentucky enclaves, so Chad was raring to mix it up with them while I had relegated myself to a faint hope of grabbing age-group money. Of course, Chad's in my age group, so I was pulling especially hard for him to take one of the top three overall spots.

The sun poked its face through a haze of clouds just in time for the 8 a.m. start and Louise Mandrell herself was on hand to start the sweaty parade. At the gun, the Africans quickly formed a loose lead group in the first downhill 200 meters and led the steady climb up the main drag over the next kilometer-plus. When we'd surveyed the course the night before we had counted on even effort yielding a slow first mile, a faster second mile and a very fast last 1.1. I threaded my way through the trailing throng and wound up at 4:58 at the mile mark, feeling, well, hot. I was surprised at the split and encouraged to push a little (John Tuttle, 43 years old, was about 30 meters ahead) before an annoying but relatively innocent-feeling gut cramp gave rise not to pure air, but to something a bit more involved than that. Damned sulfates. I put my head down and sullied on, my concentration not helped by this latest variable.

At the turnaround about 2800 meters in I saw Chad hanging onto sixth amidst a flurry of ebony bodies and when I turned for home myself I still thought I might catch Tuttle, who was having an off-day. Another wave of cramps came and went but in truth I don't think they affected me all that much because I didn't have a whole lot to give. I felt like I was running about 5:10 pace and was in no real distress, yet couldn't seem to open up appreciably. My two-mile split was 10:13. So much for picking it up in the second mile. There was no one within a hundred meters behind me and Tuttle was picking it up, heartened, perhaps, by the flagging African he was passing. I picked it up some on the downhill, figuring I still might duck under the vaunted 16:00 barrier. I got to three miles in 15:24 and wound up in 15:52, trailing eleven Africans and four Americans - Chad (14:49), Toney Cosey (15:28 and clearly in it for a workout), Stu Ellington (also 15:28) and Tuttle (15:40). Jared Segera, who two weeks earlier had run 45:35 at the Boilermaker 15K, won the race in 14:22. My pulse (and I'm not sure why I thought to check it) had dropped to 120 within a minute of my crossing the finish line; I didn't take this as a good sign, regarding it instead as a badge of wimphood. Happily, Chad and I took first and second in our age group, netting $100 and $50 respectively. Those nice (and for me, unexpected) bonuses turned out to be necessities.

At the awards ceremony Ms. Mandrell personally administered checks and hugs to all money winners. When I got my hug it was unlike any I'd ever received - I couldn't put my finger on it, but I believe it had something to do with Ms. Mandrell's almost cartoonish top-heaviness that simple good nutrition and favorable genetics could not have accounted for by themselves. Viva la South!

But the real fun began on the ride home. We had joked that if nothing else we were bound to get back to Brevard in far less time than it had taken us to get to the race site the previous day. Bad move. About a third of the way home the right front wheel bearing in Chad's truck basically disintegrated. To make a painfully long tale somewhat shorter, we wound up riding almost 90 miles in a tow truck and signing over our race winnings to a gentleman representing the Hartford (Tenn.) Exxon. In all, the return trip took seven hours.

As for my race, I can't complain as I had only stepped onto the track once in the previous six weeks or so and the optimistic Yankee conversion bot in my heat-addled brain figured I'd have run 15:30 on a flat course on a cool day. Maybe 15:20 if I'd been dropped out of an airplane.